THE POWER OF THE PEN

PRISONERS’ LETTERS TO EXPLORE EXTREME IMPRISONMENT

Marion Vannier1

University of Manchester, UK

Abstract:

This article examines how we might best examine the most extreme and inaccessible corners of imprisonment. Drawing on a study of life imprisonment without parole (LWOP) in California, this article argues that prisoners’ letters can shed exceptional light on the hidden and unspoken experiences of imprisonment. It provides an in-depth methodological and reflective outline of how to use prisoners’ letters, a familiar tactic in prison researchers’ and advocates’ toolkits, but a research implement that is rarely discussed explicitly. By better understanding how to do prison research with letters and the emotions these might provoke in the process, this article demonstrates the very specific and distinct value of the method, in particular how letters can contribute to knowledge about extreme penal severity.

Key words: letters, prison research methods, life imprisonment, ethics, emotions.

Words: 8835

INTRODUCTION

There is a nascent and fast-growing literature on LWOP (Appleton and Grøver, 2007; Ogletree and Sarat, 2012; Leigey, 2015; Girling, 2016; Seeds, 2018), yet little empirical attention has been paid to the lived experience of LWOP’s severity likely because US prisons are structurally and bureaucratically difficult to access (Simon, 2000; Rhodes, 2001; Wacquant, 2002; Reiter, 2014). This article examines how to optimally examine some of the most extreme and hidden experiences of incarceration. It draws on a 2014 study of LWOP in California that relied on 299 prisoners’ letters, thousands of archival documents, official reports and statistics, as well as 58 interviews.

1 Corresponding author: Marion Vannier, School of Law, The University of Manchester, Manchester, M13 9PL, Email: marion.vannier@manchester.ac.uk .

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The argument is that prisoners’ letters can illuminate some of the most unspoken experiences of imprisonment. While prison researchers and advocates regularly use prisoners’ letters (Bosworth et al., 2005; Human Rights Watch, 2012; Seal, 2014), very few studies have described how they use these accounts in practice, and they seldom discuss why this method is important to contribute something distinct to knowledge about penal severity.

In addressing a methodological gap in prison research and enriching the LWOP scholarship, this paper gives original insights on an innovative qualitative criminological tool. It provides a reflective example of how letters can be collected, analysed and interpreted; highlights some of the emotional and ethical dimensions associated with working with prisoners’ letters; and considers their benefits and critical challenges for the empirical study of prison, prison reform and theoretical penology.

This article is structured in five sections. The first part summarises LWOP’s pixelated image that prisoners’ testimonies can complete, enrich and correct. The second section situates the article within a scholarship that uses prisoners’ letters but seldom explains how it does so. The third section focuses on methodology and how letters can be collected and analysed. The fourth part demonstrates how letters can empirically contribute to knowledge about penal severity. The fifth part reflects on some ethical and emotional challenges that arise during, and enrich, the research process. The conclusion discusses the broader implications of working with prisoners’ letters. Overall, this paper proposes a detailed methodological and reflective outline for drawing on prisoners’ letters to augment understandings of extreme imprisonment.

I. LWOP’S PIXELATED IMAGE

To make the overall argument, this article draws on a case study conducted in California in 2014, which is summarised and situated within the broader literature on LWOP. With some rare exceptions (Leigey, 2015; Vannier, 2016), most of the empirical works that explore LWOP’s

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severity stem from prisoners (Hassine, 2010) or policy reports (Nellis, 2017). Historical (Seeds, 2018), sociological (Appleton and Grøver, 2007) and legal works on LWOP (Steiker and Steiker, 2012), regularly underline that the punishment denies the hope of ever being released to a number of individuals, including African Americans and Latinos, juveniles, the elderly and the mentally ill (Nellis, 2013). Studies further stress that the punishment exacerbates the wider set of psychological and physical suffering associated with life imprisonment (Dolovich, 2012; Sliva, 2015). Other analyses propose that LWOP is a death sentence (Villaume, 2005; Henry, 2012) that differs from the traditional death penalty (Gottschalk, 2013). In summary, there are two predominant narratives about LWOP’s severity: the punishment is ‘extreme’, yet not ‘as severe’ as capital punishment.

Few of these scholarly works propose empirically-informed understandings of LWOP’s intrinsic and distinctive punitive features and thereby remain limited: what does the denial of hope mean? How are LWOP prisoners treated and under what conditions? Does the punishment vary in its implementation locally? To what extent and how does the punishment amount to a death sentence? The systematic comparison of the punishment to the death penalty and life imprisonment further thwarts appreciations of its inherent severity. As scholarly accounts repeat that LWOP is worse than long-term incarceration but not quite equivalent to the traditional death penalty, the very meaning of dying behind bars has waned and lost its horror. LWOP’s image has thus become rather pixelated: some of its features remain indistinct whilst other aspects have been magnified out of proportion.

My study thus sought to enlarge LWOP’s picture by exploring the features of its severity, in particular the meanings ascribed to ‘death’ by those serving permanent incarceration (Vannier, 2016). It did not employ a political conceptualization of death as per Mbembé’s work (2003) nor did it rely on biological understandings of death, which in the context of extreme punishments is generally associated with methods of executions

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and their medicalization (Denno, 2002; Groner, 2002). Instead, the research focused on the different sociological constructions of death that emerged from LWOP prisoners’ written testimonies. The Californian case study was important (on local analyses, see Lynch, 2011; Schoenfeld, 2016) because of the scale of its LWOP population and its position as a ‘punitive trendsetter’ (Reiter, 2016b:488). The state was one of the first to implement LWOP as an alternative to the death penalty in 1978, setting an example for other states, and between 1980 and 2016 the LWOP population multiplied 40-fold, holding the third largest LWOP population (Nellis, 2017).

The main findings that inform the rest of this article are summarised as follows: for the men and women who participated in the research, death takes on a symbolic form experienced through the passing of time. It depicts both the certainty of dying behind bars, acquired once appeals have run out, and the uncertainty of the time of death. Death is experienced as the incalculable duration of the time left to serve, which eventually becomes conflated with the time left to live. It is also experienced as a form of dehumanization because inmates’ capacity to change goes unacknowledged. Opportunities that would validate such evolutions are limited and restrained. Concurrently, and throughout the duration of their sentence, inmates are coerced into becoming front-row witnesses of others’ evolutions: prisoners who come in and out of prison, children who grow up, parents who pass away. Their testimonies finally give emphasis to an embodied construction of death, provoked by ageing and diseased bodies, as well as through the removal of parenthood and parenting. To summarize, in looking to California and to prisoners’ experience of LWOP, the study contributes to an emerging literature on LWOP and to a fast-growing local-focused prison scholarship. The argument that prisoners’ letters can uncover hidden experiences of extreme penal severity further builds on a literature that regularly draws on inmates’ written accounts.

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II. USES OF PRISONERS’ LETTERS

While prison researchers and advocates regularly use prisoners’ letters to enhance theoretical and empirical knowledge about imprisonment and to provoke reform, there are very few studies describing how they use letters, and why this method can contribute to knowledge. Prison sociologists use inmates’ mail available on websites (Solitary Watch or Minutes Before Six), or in archives (Seal, 2014; Rubin, 2017b) and newspapers (San Francisco BayView) to shed light on the punitive features of imprisonment. Prisoners’ letters provide authentic details that only those serving long-term imprisonment (Wright et al., 2016), locked in solitary conferment (Reiter, 2016a) or held on death row (Maybin, 2000) can impart. Janet Maybin (2000:151), on her research on death row penfriends, stated: ‘Data collected about the experience of this unusual group of letter writers has its own intrinsic interest in offering a rare glimpse of life on death row from the perspective of prisoners themselves.’

These testimonies not only illuminate the embodied suffering associated with specific forms of incarceration, they also provide unique details on the conditions and space of imprisonment (Jewkes, 2012; Reiter, 2016b). Prison studies also use letters to give a sense of the prisoners’ adjustments in prison. In her historical work on the Eastern Penitentiary in Pennsylvania, Ashley Rubin relies on prisoners’ archived writings to focus on the smaller, and everyday acts of resistance described as ‘frictions’ (Rubin, 2015:24). Corentin Durand (2014) closely analyses complaints written by French prisoners to administrative authorities to explore different forms of expression used to challenge the prison system.

Prisoners’ written accounts further shed light on the power dynamics that shape penal severity (Scott, 1991; Chamberlen, 2016) including daily routines, interactions with prison staff and other prisoners, and institutions’ architecture (Rubin, 2017a). Prison historians also use prisoners’ letters as empirical sources to contextualise and map out penal trends. McLennan (2008) draws on letters to develop a history

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of imprisonment in the US and identifies two main episodes: the development of a large-scale prison labor system in the nineteenth century and then a period of attempts to reform prison life to achieve prisoners’ emancipation in the early twentieth century (see also Meranze, 1996). Scholars not only utilise prisoners’ testimonies to trace the past, they also use them to critically discuss new forms of incarceration, such as solitary confinement (Reiter, 2016a) or immigration detention (Bosworth, 2014). In this way, letters are able to illuminate the continuities and discontinuities of penal power over time.

Advocates and researchers also rely on letters to encourage penal reform. Human Rights Watch’s report (2012) includes extracts from letters to highlight the suffering of youth offenders serving LWOP. Prison scholars who rely on letters might seek to both contribute to knowledge and stress the policy implications of their findings. For instance, Upton et al. (2017) explored nineteenth century last statements written by prisoners on death row and found that reconstructing and sharing positive images with the public was essential for the condemned. They thus recommended that better mental care be afforded in the lead-up to executions.

While prisoners’ letters are a familiar tactic in prison researchers’ and advocates’ toolkits, the research implement is rarely discussed explicitly. More specifically, these works provide little guidance on how to find, collect and analyze letters. Are there any practical barriers that arise? Why is this method particularly relevant to understanding the hidden experiences of extreme imprisonment? Finally, it is important to consider the emotions that letters might elicit during the research process, as these too inform and enrich such works. In proposing a thorough roadmap for using prisoners’ letters, this article addresses both a methodological gap in prison research and an empirical gap in the LWOP scholarship.

III. METHODS

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I spent four months in California collecting relevant data and used the following mixed methods: i) a textual analysis of different sets of documents, including archival legislative texts; US and California case law, criminal and sentencing laws; death penalty abolitionist organizations’ policy documents; state statistics and reports; and prison administrative rules and regulations; ii) 58 semi-structured interviews with legal practitioners (prosecutors and defence lawyers), academics and prison advocates; and iii) a textual study of 299 prisoners’ written testimonies. Prisoners’ letters open a window into hidden experiences of extreme severity because they overcome space, time and cost barriers. Drawing on the California study, this section illustrates how they can be collected, combined and analysed.

Collecting letters

Where letters are not publicly available, they can be collected from prisoners directly (Bosworth et al., 2005; Liebling et al., 2018), yet this is not as straightforward as it appears. The California Department of Corrections’ (CDCR) inmate locator online system does not specify the sentence prisoners are serving (Inmate Locator, 2018). Furthermore, LWOP prisoners are usually held in remote high-security facilities, which hold a wide array of inmates, making it additionally difficult to identify those serving LWOP.

Like any other method of investigation, letters require thorough planning. I prepared a participant information form and a flyer detailing a set of exploratory questions. They were addressed to prisoners serving LWOP in California who were older than 18 years, thereby excluding juveniles. Participants were selected following a ‘purposive’ approach (Ritchie and Lewis 2003:78-80); they had specific knowledge and expertise and held ‘particular features or characteristics that will enable detailed exploration and understanding of the central themes and puzzles which the researcher wishes to study.’ (Ritchie and Lewis 2003:78). The documents explained the nature and purpose of the study, its outcomes (i.e. possible publications), confidentiality arrangements, and

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participants’ right to refuse to take part and withdraw from the study at any time. Participants were asked to sign their letters and confirm that they consented to participate. Because of the institutional nature of the scholarship, this methodological frame was reviewed and approved by my institution’s Research Ethics Committee. Regulations on using letters might differ between countries. In the United States, for instance, prison researchers must have Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval.

Getting help from the inside was crucial to collect these accounts. Kenneth Hartman, the president of The Other Death Penalty Project (ODPP), sent copies of my documents to the organisation’s members and to inmates held inside his prison. Separately, I asked the editor of the SanFrancisco BayView, a newspaper distributed in different prisons across the state, whether they would agree to publish the flyer. This approach carries a significant degree of uncertainty for researchers; there was no way of knowing whether prisoners would share their experiences. However, after 3 weeks, the mailbox I had set up in California was full.

The ODPP’s role was clearly paramount in convincing prisoners to participate in the study. Many participants mentioned the organization or its president in their letters, and even attached the printed flyer they had received. Others wrote that friends behind bars had convinced them to send their personalized accounts. For many, the research was viewed as an opportunity to acknowledge their existence, a phenomenon previously discussed by Bosworth et al. (2005:255) and trigger reform. Gregory (59 years old, white, Salinas)2 wrote ‘[p]erhaps someday, you can relay to the general public that a convicted killer can change.’3

By May 2014, 327 men and women from different ethnic and age groups, incarcerated across 15 prisons, had shared their views. Given the size of the state and the spread of its high-security prisons, it would have been impossible to locate LWOP prisoners, visit 15 prisons and cover the expenses thereof, and interview over 300 inmates in 4 months. The size

2 Identifying information are discussed later. 3 Other studies have found that prisoners participate in prison research to avoid boredom or help society (Moser et al., 2004).

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and variety of the sample illustrate how letters can overcome space, time and costs barrier, and represent a wide range of experiences.

Analysis

To best capture prisoners’ experience of extreme severity, an exploratory, detail-driven, multilayered and collaborative approach was preferred. The method involved reading and rereading the material until themes emerged (Peräkylä, 2005:870). It was logical to proceed as such because at the time there was no comparable work on LWOP’s severity at local or national level. I deliberately began with the prisoners’ letters before transcribing interviews or returning to the official documents in a bid to destabilize the general valorization of official documents and elite interviews to the detriment of prisoners’ accounts. Prior to reading, letters were organized according to the prison they had originated from. This way I was able to recall, compare and combine the varying narratives presented. I then completed two full, in-depth, readings of the 327 letters.

Following a grounded theory approach (Birks and Mills 2011:1-15), thematic findings were first identified inductively. Previous prison studies on prisoners’ embodied experience of long-term incarceration (Hassine, 2010) and on the denial of hope (chapters in Ogletree and Sarat, 2012) guided the initial reading of the letters. My first reading thus concentrated on (a) whether prisoners described death as an embodied experience (with a focus on illnesses, ageing and medical treatment), (b) how, if at all, they distinguished their sentence from the death penalty, and (c) whether and why prisoners lost hope of release.

Two additional themes emerged from this first reading: death as associated to the passing of time, and death as tied to exclusions from programmes, jobs and treatments. This initial reading prompted further academic research, in particular Goffman’s (1961) works on the ‘mortification of the self’, and O’Donnell (2014) and Armstrong’s (2015) studies on the passing of time. In summary, five themes about death

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materialized from the first reading: bodies, the death penalty, exclusion, time and hope.

The first reading was rigorous and time consuming. To avoid damaging the letters, I underlined references to the themes I was exploring with a pencil. I developed tables, where each column referred to a topic identified after the first reading. Each letter’s reference number (e.g. LM12_Calipatria or LW1_CaliforniaWomenFacility) was recorded in the appropriate column. At this stage, I excluded nine letters sent from other states or countries, and 19 letters written by prisoners who were not serving LWOP sentences.

I used a second reading of the remaining 299 letters to reconsider my interpretation of the initial themes (hope, death penalty, pains) and to examine the new themes that had emerged (time, exclusions). For instance, I noted the mentions to the difficulty grasping the duration of the punishment (e.g. ‘When I was sentenced, the gravity of its meaning wasn’t fully comprehensible’ (Daniel, aged 30, Cambodian, Pleasant Valley).

I then transcribed into NVivo selected quotations that specifically referred to the five themes to study the language prisoners used and to identify additional substance. In selecting extracts, I did not share participants’ exact narrative (see Josselson, 2007) but included and combined extracts within the study’s narrative, structured around the five themes. When typing-up the quotes rather than taking a photograph of the handwritten text, I also modified the visual appearance of prisoners’ testimonies.

The letters were compared to one another and cross-referenced with other documentary sources. Triangulation (Berg, 2007:7) helps ‘to confirm and to improve the clarity, or precision, of a research finding’ (Ritchie and Lewis 2003:358) and thereby increases validity of the findings (Noaks and Wincup 2004:9). For instance, Harry wrote that, despite being terminally ill, he was ineligible for release (Harry, aged 56,

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RJ Donovan). To clarify this point, I turned to California law and found that LWOP inmates were ineligible for medical compassionate release even if they have less than 6 months to live,4 or for early parole if they become medically incapacitated.5 Comparing perspectives allows for new and deeper understandings about penal severity to emerge; it also provides insights on conflicting narratives. Rather than privileging one viewpoint over another or considering some sources as establishing ‘the truth’ and discrediting others, I treated each account as providing a different but equally weighted perspective. This method, in sum, examined one phenomenon from multiple and ‘collaborative’ perspectives (see Reiter, 2014a).

IV. THE RICHNESS OF PRISONERS’ LETTERS

Like other means of investigations, this tool of research has limitations. Prisoners might misunderstand or misinterpret the questions being asked (Bosworth et al. 2005:252), which the researcher cannot clarify as could be done face-to-face. Careful consideration when drafting them is thus key. Here, I used straightforward vocabulary that referred to inmates’ daily routines and environment. The queries were tailored around the five senses (‘what do you see, feel and smell?’). I also avoided abstract notions such as ‘life’ or ‘death’. A first draft was reviewed both by academics with extensive prison research experience and researchers with little fieldwork practice, to refine the questions.6

Furthermore, this type of methodology can exclude certain testimonies. Letters bar illiterate prisoners from sharing their

4 CPC 1170 (e)(2)(C); (see also 15 CCR 3076(b)).5 CPC 3550(a) & (b)(1); (see also 15 CCR 3359.1 (a)(3)).6 “In your own words, and in whichever style you wish to share it in, please describe your experience of LWOP. For example, you could describe:

o what you see, feel, taste or hear,o what you find to be the most difficult part of your sentence,o what, if any, are some of the pleasures you experience, o what you find to be the hardest about your sentence, Physically?

Psychologically?o who, if anyone, or what, helps you to cope with your sentence,o the prison you’re currently held and whether it differs to any other

prisons you have been to.”

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experiences. In 2017, three out of five people in US prisons could not read (Sainato, 2017). John asked that his ‘rough inarticulate essay’ be excused (John, 28 years old, Corcoran, 10 years incarcerated). To overcome this, some participants wrote their letters in Spanish whilst others asked another inmate to write for them.

Prisoners might also be discouraged from sending letters because of costs and strict mailing procedures. Under the state prison ‘Operations Manual’, indigent prisoners are allotted five envelopes with state paid postage per week (excluding legal correspondence) and ‘enough paper’ to be determined by each institution.7 Each institution then proposes a multi-step process within strict deadlines.

Inmates, like all of us, react differently to sharing personal experiences in writing. Finding words to describe what one feels when serving permanent incarceration can be overwhelming. Denis (32 years old, High Desert) writes ‘I really do not know how to tell you how it feels to be serving this much time...it’s hard for me to articulate and put into words and form.’ Others might prefer not to take part in the study. One inmate did not wish to participate in the study because he found it difficult to share his personal story with a complete stranger. Some participants turned to other prisoners for inspiration. In the study, four sets of twin letters were sent from three different prisons. While critiques would argue that duplicates are manipulative and at risk of falsifying findings, a blanket rejection of such accounts would entail missing out on important contributions. I included similar letters for the following reasons. None of the ‘duplicates’ were actually identical; they always included distinguishing features (e.g. author’s name, age, ethnic origins, and personal background). Copying the structure and format could also be perceived as borrowing technical skills from a more confident and literate writer because writing is a hard task to complete. These letters are essentially illustrative of prisoners’ desire to have their voices heard and concern that only particular stories get people’s attention. They are

7 54010.5.3 (CDCR, 2018). The manual supplements rarely specify the amount of paper given per prisoner, but in 2014, inmates from California Men’s Colony were allowed ten sheets of paper (54010.5, California Men’s Colony, 2014).

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revelatory of prisoners’ powerlessness; not necessarily an example of misinformation and manipulation.

Despite these apparent limitations, letters include authentic and rich details about perpetual imprisonment, as illustrated by the following example. While the literature on LWOP regularly refers to the denial of hope to stress the punishment’s extreme severity (Ogletree and Sarat 2012), it remains unclear what hope means and how its loss emerges. The Supreme Court suggests that hope is tied to individuals’ capacity to change (Graham v Florida 2010). While the case law is limited to juvenile offenders, it raises questions about LWOP prisoners more generally: do they change and how? Are they given opportunities to evolve, and to what end, if they are never released? The letters collected in California in 2014 correct certain assumptions and provide a deeper understanding of hope. Hope is not only tied to parole but also to other release mechanisms, including post-conviction appeals and medical release procedures. The accounts further reveal that LWOP prisoners are eligible for a limited number of activities in prison but are often the last to be selected as priority is given to those with a hearing date. LWOP prisoners thus have fewer opportunities to change (programmes, jobs) and have neither a stage (parole, appeals, medical treatment) nor an audience (parole officers, judges and juries, health staff) to witness any change in their behaviour.

Letters can elicit in-depth knowledge about hidden experiences of extreme severity for several reasons. Firstly, letters include details that only those who experience LWOP can share. Prisoners’ accounts tend to be treated with suspicion because they are viewed as subjective and biased (Presser 2009:181). They are nonetheless authentic because their testimonies offer contemporary and apposite epistemological accounts about one punishment at one specific point in time (on prisoner subjects’ reliability, Barragan et al., 2016). Each view is indeed unique as it is filtered by emotional and cognitive understanding and reported in the

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personal language of each inmate usages (Dexter, 2006). Like photographs, letters are also personalised snapshots of the social and historical contexts in which they are written; they illuminate ‘particular lives lived in specific social contexts and historical circumstances.’ (Jolly and Stanley, 2005:101). For instance, expressions about hope transcended gender, age and ethnicity, yet varied across facilities where prisoners were held. The richness of their narratives thus lies as much in the diversity and dissimilarities of their individual representations, as it does in the commonalities and shared understandings of their reality. Their perspectives are reliable precisely because they shed light on some things while missing others.

Secondly, letters are especially rich because they are such a familiar tool of communication. In prison, they are one of the few ways to communicate with the outside world (other than limited, expensive phone calls, and occasional visits). Writing and receiving letters is central to prisoners’ lives (Maybin, 2000:151) and can provide a purpose or reference point during endless days (Maybin 2000:158). This method of research provides the space and time for participants to increase the flow of information. They are not constrained by stringent time requirements, which are often imposed on interviews and which can create a stressful atmosphere.

Third, letters are particularly helpful for understanding extreme punishments like LWOP where there is no hope of release. In addition to the constructions discussed above (i.e. procedural and prison treatments), the denial of hope entails that prisoners will not be able to voice, in person and with the outside world, their experience of perpetual incarceration. In the specific context of punitive permanency and irrevocability, letters provide a unique tool to share perspectives about their capacity to change, live and die behind bars. They also offer an exceptional opportunity for the outside world to recognise prisoners’ vulnerability and mortality. It is because letters become, in the context of no hope, such powerful testaments of prisoners’ humanity and

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impermanence, that they can produce raw, in-depth and detailed knowledge about the extreme nature of perpetual incarceration.

Envelopes, finally, can contain documents that further enrich understandings about penal severity. For instance, a participant attached a 1993 letter from the Board of Prison informing him he was no longer eligible to have his sentenced reviewed. This document evidenced that the punishment had changed over time and that policymakers did not intend to remove all hope of release when LWOP was first introduced. The richness of letters ultimately lies in the power dynamics they shape and the emotions they provoke.

V. ETHICS AND EMOTIONS

Reflexivity is of paramount importance in qualitative research (Armstrong et al., 2017; Sharpe, 2017), namely scrutinising researchers’ positionality and reflecting on its effect throughout the research process, and considering the possible contradictions from wanting to ‘give a voice’ (Phillips and Earle, 2010:372). Like interviews or observations, scholars who draw on prisoners’ letters become a research instrument (Liebling, 1999) that shapes the production and dissemination of knowledge, and that ultimately needs to be taken seriously. By sharing some insights into the power dynamics and emotions letters provoke during the research process, without, however, delving into ‘self-indulgence’ (Phillips and Earle, 2010:372), this section demonstrates the specific and distinct value of the method to enhance understandings of extreme penal severity.

Empowerment

Letters reduce power inequalities that arise from research processes and thereby encourage inmates to share their views about hidden experiences (Bosworth et al. 2005:254). They give participants the time to reflect before replying, or to draft multiple versions of their accounts. Some may choose not to write when in a particular state of mind, or

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decide to respond to certain questions at length, exclude some and include their own, cross out or highlight sections, or even draw rather than use words. With letters, prisoners can also elect to not respond, which might be harder to do in person. The distance between the writer and the reader further reassures individuals to share their views (Maybin 2000:168).

Preserving prisoners’ agency to write and describe their experience is thus essential. In my study, it was important to acknowledge receipt of their testimonies, which differs from exchanging letters. The flyer made it clear that prisoners would not necessarily get a response and the letter Hartman sent to The ODPP mailing list further stressed that the study was about hearing their stories (Hartman, 2014). I did, however, reply to the first 50 letters, thanking participants for taking part, but as letters kept arriving, I became overwhelmed by the costs and time of responding. To acknowledge receipt of their letters, I asked Kenneth Hartman and the editor of the SanFrancisco BayView to share a letter thanking participants and describing the next steps of the project. While I was worried that participants would not read my response, these concerns were partly mitigated by the fact that Kenneth sent my acknowledgment letter to the same mailing list he had used for the original flyer. I also sent my publication on women’s experiences serving LWOP (Vannier, 2016) to one of the participant’s lawyer, who gave her a copy. The female participants were all held in the same prison, increasing the chances of the paper circulating.

The conventional wisdom in prison research is that ensuring confidentiality and anonymity of prisoner participants by concealing or modifying identifying information will minimise risks of harm (Bachman and Schutt, 2016:69). If prison researchers are generally requested to take steps to mask their participants, they are not compelled to do so (Lahman et al., 2015; Jerolmack and Murphy, 2017). For instance, the UK university I was affiliated to when I completed the research in California asked, ‘how I would protect the subjects’ privacy in any publication arising from the project.’ The British Society of Criminology Code of

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Ethics further provides: ‘Researchers in the UK have no special legal protection that requires them to uphold confidentiality (as medical staff and lawyers do).’ (British Society of Criminology, 2015). In the US, researchers must complete IRBs that generally require evidence that measures were taken to protect participants.

However, it might be difficult to assure the promise of confidentiality (Bosk, 2008:92) For instance, participants might unmask themselves by sharing similar views elsewhere. In Too Cruel Not Unusual Enough, a prisoners’ anthology, some participants wrote similar accounts without anonymizing their names (Hartman, 2013). Others might unveil their identity on social media platforms like Facebook or organizations’ blogs. For example, Kenneth Hartman wrote several op-eds and blog posts describing his experience of LWOP in California high-security facilities (Hartman, 2012). In some instances, it might even be practically impossible for researchers to guarantee confidentiality. As Leo (1996)argued, researchers’ moral obligations vary, and in some settings, like prisons, moral absolutism is not only ‘problematic in theory’ but also ‘unworkable in practice.’ Paying close attention to the local setting thus becomes key (Lynch 2011).8 In California, mail screening and monitoring in prison are barriers to using letters and carry with them an element of risk for authors. Non-confidential letters can be read in California by prison staff.9 The other participant who declined to take part in the study specified it was because he feared his letter might be read. Furthermore, the rules applicable to inmates’ mail often change and are particularly stringent in California. Only one month after I left, the CDCR implemented a new policy that banned publications that ‘indicate an association with groups that are oppositional to authority and society.’ For Mary Ratcliff, the editor of the San Francisco BayView, the 2014 policy sought ‘to end the dialogue [with the public], to cut off access to 8 Methodological, ethical, and legal issues arise when researchers must limit confidentiality to satisfy institutional obligations and compromise their ethical duties to participants (see Erikson, 1995; Palys and Lowman, 2001). 9 Rule 54010.8 (CDCR, 2018) provides that ‘All non-confidential inmate mail, incoming or outgoing, is subject to being read in its entirety by designated staff.’ Only documents exchanged with lawyers or other officials are legally considered confidential (Rule 54010.12.1, CDCR, 2018).

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knowledge’ (Ratcliff, cited in Britton, 2014). In light of these barriers, promising participants absolute confidentiality would have given them ‘a false sense of security’ and been ‘ethically questionable’ (Jerolmack and Murphy, 2017:3). To ensure honesty and transparency towards the participants, it was thus important to stress from the outset that confidentiality could not be guaranteed over the course of the research process but only upon receipt of the letters. I also believe participants chose to correspond with the knowledge that their letters might be read by prison ‘censors’.

Upon receipt of the testimonies, there are other precautions prison researchers can take to provide a degree of confidentiality. Some may not record names or remove identifying details of sources at the earliest stage possible (Israel, 2004). In this study, the letters were all maintained in strict confidence and kept in a locked filing cabinet. Participants were given a pseudonym so that citations included in the writing-up stage, publications, or mentioned during conference talks could not be tied back to specific inmates.10 These steps raise two main ethical concerns. In keeping letters locked away confidentially and using pseudonyms, participants need the researcher’s consent to share their story with the rest of the world. Further, some prisoners may want to be named in publications to obtain some form of symbolic reward or recognition (Jerolmack and Murphy, 2017:8). While the participants in the California study wrote their names at the top of each letter, none asked to be named explicitly in publications. Instead, many wrote they were thankful for sharing their experience, suggesting that the reward lay in taking part. And to reduce the researchers’ gatekeeping power (Lahman et al., 2015), digitalizing the letters to make these accounts accessible is possible.

In fine, masking or disclosure need not be an all or nothing matter (see Jerolmack and Murphy 2017). It is possible, like Goffman in Asylums (1961), to identify the place of investigation while hiding participant identities. Researchers can use pseudonyms for participants without 10 I kept a separate subject enrolments log showing codes, names, pseudonyms and locations.

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masking other identifying and humanizing information such as their gender, age, or ethnic origins (Hulley et al. 2016). For instance, I specified the time they had spent in prison, their age, ethnic origins when specified, and the prison in which they were held to humanize them (e.g. Robert, aged 23, Black, Calipatria).

Emotions

The emotions letters provoke during the research process also contribute to eliciting rich details about penal severity: they are personally and intellectually inspirational. Only a few criminologists acknowledge the personal difficulties or contradictions about doing prison research. These works document feelings of distress and disempowerment when witnessing others’ suffering (Liebling, 1999; Beyens et al., 2013; Reiter, 2014a; Bosworth and Kellezi, 2017), or describe some of the physical discomforts from working in locked-up conditions (Wacquant, 2002; Reiter and Koenig, 2018). For Reiter (2014a), few scholars in the US conduct qualitative ethnographical studies of prisons because it is so emotionally challenging.

Emotions not only affect researchers, they also shape research interests, guide and enrich methodological approaches, data and analyses, and reports (Jewkes, 2012; Crewe, 2014; Farrant, 2014; Liebling, 2014; Wakeman, 2014). There might be some overlap across experiences over the world, yet emotions are tailored by the specific setting explored at one specific point in time and are forged by researchers’ own personal biographies (e.g. Wakeman, 2014). Emotions are not peripheral to the production of knowledge, they are very much an integral, if not a constitutive, part thereof. Engaging with the affectivity of the process is not mere mood music, it enlivens the social word we seek to understand in ways that are less mechanistic, less grand and sweeping, and in this way, more humane.

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Unlike interviews, researchers who use inmates’ letters will not bear direct or visual witness of interviewees’ suffering.11 In my experience, working with letters provoked a sense of distanciation from participants’ experience, something that is common amongst those who witness human rights violations (Cohen, 2001) or who visit prisons (Sparks, 2002). The disconnect, however, had more to do with the fact that letters were fascinating objects to study than with the difficulty processing others’ pain. Further, researchers are accustomed to scrutinising documentary data. Analysing letters felt familiar and achievable. It was less daunting to read over 300 letters multiple times than it was to transcribe and analyse 58 interviews. In summary, my emotional responses to ‘letters as objects’ included a heightened curiosity and a sense of comfort.

Prisoners’ substantive accounts can however aggravate this feeling of detachment. Jim was sentenced to LWOP when he was 18 years old. In his letter, he listed all the things he would never do as an adult, such as going on a date or ordering a beer in a bar. Like memento mori, letters force you to participate in other people’s ‘mortality, vulnerability and mutability’ (Sontag 1977:15), which can be overwhelming. Regardless of the fact that handwritten letters like Jim’s12 are poignant and tangible evidence of participants’ humanity and pain (Liebling, 2014:484), the number of testimonies sharing similar experiences of suffering provoked a form of emotional ‘overload’, a sense of ‘this is too much.’ Emotional reactions, or their absence, can indeed be exacerbated when large groups, rather than identifiable individuals, are exposed to distant suffering, as it becomes harder to identify and relate to one person’s pain (Cohen, 2001; Boltanski, 2008; Capers, 2012).

Prison researchers provide helpful guidance to address such emotions, such as developing strategies prior to fieldwork (Reiter and Koenig, 2018) or building community and supportive networks (Liebling, 2014; Bosworth and Kellezi, 2017). Institutions like Berkeley or Oxford

11 Researchers describe how they witnessed interviewees crying or screaming in anger and frustration (Liebling, 1999; Bosworth and Kellezi, 2017).12 Few letters were typed.

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also propose support programmes to address vicarious trauma. My approach was to break down the research process into very small achievable and routine tasks. I filed the letters based on their location; before reading, I would first locate the prison on a map. A set time slot in the day was allotted to working on prisoners’ testimonies. Consequently, the analyses felt more focused and localised, helping make prisoners more identifiable.

The emotions arising from ‘letters as objects’ (curiosity and familiarity) and ‘letters as content-holders’ (overload) and the responses thereto (local-focused analyses), shaped my research primarily in two ways. Whilst in California I felt encouraged and proactive in correcting certain misconceptions about LWOP (contra. anxiety of having to ‘push through’, in Reiter and Koenig, 2018). For instance, I presented my initial findings to a Japanese delegation visiting California to explore alternatives to the death penalty. The letters were also inspiring intellectually. The sheer quantity of letters, their geographical span, and the sample’s range, made the emerging themes particularly vivid: they were exceptionally illuminating of the exclusionary and irrevocable nature of LWOP.

IMPLICATIONS

This article’s main contribution is to propose a roadmap for the use of an untapped empirical source to enhance understandings of the most extreme yet inaccessible corners of penal severity. It considers both letters’ methodological advantages (collection, analysis, and findings) and the more ethical, emotional and reflective aspects they provoke during the research process. The originality thus lies in combining considerations on ‘how to do research’ and ‘doing prison research’ with letters (see Jewkes 2012 and Farrant 2014).

In illuminating prisoners’ experience of LWOP in California, letters have important empirical, theoretical, ethical, methodological and policy implications. In putting a spotlight on the harshness of perpetual incarceration and prison life more generally, letters make penal severity

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empirically more transparent. They shed new light on how procedural and carceral treatments shape the denial of hope, and prompt a reconsideration of the rather Manichean ‘life’ and ‘death’ categorisations of penalties in the US and across the world. Letters also complicate the ethics and emotional work of prison research (i.e. risk of detachment, emotional overload), and as testaments to prisoners’ humanity, they call for careful reflexivity. Letters’ capacity to reach the most hidden corners of imprisonment further overcome certain methodological limitations and avoid getting ‘intellectually stuck’ (Bosworth and Kaufman, 2012:197; see also Zedner, 2002). For Ferrell (2009:1) criminologists too often use methods that are ‘wholly inadequate and inappropriate to the study of human affairs’ (Ferrell, 2009:1). While legislative records, legal sources and official data all provide important and relevant information about punishments, they offer an incomplete picture of their distinct punitive features. Studies that privilege grand narratives or theories are also poor indicators of severity as they tend to remain at the surface and lack nuance (Crewe, 2015:51). While these works retain significance, they would be more compelling if read in conjunction with prisoners’ written testimonies. Exploring the extent to which LWOP is a death sentence is also critical for re-evaluating certain reform attempts. In 2012, death penalty abolitionists promoted LWOP to replace the death penalty in an unprecedented California-wide campaign (Dilts, 2015). If LWOP is experienced as another death sentence, should reformers not reconsider their strategies?

As informative and thought-provoking as these conclusions might be, the case study in California only tells one story about prisoners’ experiences in one state at one time-point. Letters, however, as an innovative, practical, rich and inspirational research tool, facilitate comparative national and international research. Future studies could utilise the proposed roadmap to examine prisoners’ experiences of LWOP in different states. In 2012 Connecticut replaced the death penalty with LWOP provided inmates would be held in solitary confinement (Ridgeway and Casella, 2012). Whether this development is experienced as

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something less harsh, essentially, less like a death sentence, could be revealed by written correspondence. Letters would also be useful to explore similar forms of perpetual incarceration in the international context, such as whole life orders in the UK. Letters can also unveil hidden experiences on other topics, such as the spread of immigration detention to private spheres like hotels in France (Cooke, 2017). The power of the pen lies in its capacity to create direct, intimate, emotive correspondence, unveiling, but also engaging the researcher in, the hidden experiences of our most severe penal practices.Acknowledgements

I am especially grateful to Mary Bosworth, Louise Brangan, François Marty and Claire Vergerio, for their critical and generous input on earlier drafts. I am also very thankful to the editors and anonymous reviewers for their constructive and encouraging feedback.

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Author biographyMarion Vannier is a lecturer in criminology at The University of Manchester. Marion is also a research associate at the University of Oxford, Centre for Criminology, Border Criminologies, and The Imprisonment Observatory. Her book, Normalising Extreme Punishments: the case of life without parole in California will be published by Oxford University Press in 2019. Marion is interested in

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topics about life imprisonment more generally, and her other research inquiries include immigration studies.

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