Just Sentences

The criminal justice system finds itself overstretched and riddled with scandals around wrongful convictions, abuses of power, and failures to prevent harm and recidivism. This crisis of legitimacy is magnified by an overreliance on criminal law to solve social problems around violence and insecurity on the one hand, and the law’s seeming inability to deliver justice, either to victims or to defendants and convicts, on the other. Although central to understanding and overcoming contemporary challenges, this imbrication of need and incapacity remains undertheorized in current scholarship.

Just Sentences deploys an innovative methodology to conduct a narrative analysis of sentencing remarks in England and Wales, paying particular attention to their aesthetic dimension and their cultural role. A key component of this study engages with people on the receiving end of these sentences, who most acutely feel their consequences and are uniquely positioned to reflect on their meaning and purpose, but who are seldom given the opportunity to express these thoughts and feelings.

For this purpose, the project includes a series of creative writing workshops in English prisons where men and women are invited to creatively react to and reimagine some of these remarks.

This project is funded by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship [Project Reference: MCFSS25\250039] and by a University of Warwick Research Development Fund.