Punishing Old Age

This presentation will start with an introduction to the UKRI-funded Hope project, which seeks to explore the meaning and significance of hope among older male prisoners serving life sentences. It will also offer insights into the challenges of researching such a complex concept within a prison setting.

Drawing upon data from the project, this paper investigates the perceptions and treatment of elderly prisoners by staff, seeking to examine how the penal system grapples with the realities of aging behind bars. The analysis foregrounds the distinctive challenges that emerge as staff oscillate between dual roles—both as caregivers attending to the specific needs of older inmates and as enforcers of institutional discipline. This duality reveals a tension that rests on the traditional pillars of penal governance: risk and vulnerability.

The preliminary findings shed light on this delicate equilibrium, where penal practices have long been grounded in assessments of a prisoner’s potential threat to others and their own susceptibility to harm. The increasing presence of elderly prisoners, however, destabilizes these established criteria. Frailty, chronic illness, and diminished capacity for violence blur the boundaries between risk and vulnerability, rendering conventional approaches to punishment increasingly problematic. This disruption necessitates a continual recalibration of staff responses, as they are forced to balance security imperatives with the ethical and practical demands of managing a more vulnerable, aging population.

The paper suggests that the introduction of old age into the penal environment not only complicates traditional frameworks of punishment but also generates new complexities for staff roles and institutional policies. In doing so, it reshapes our understanding of how punishment operates in practice, calling into question the assumptions that have long underpinned its application in the context of modern incarceration.

After completing her D.Phil at the Centre for Criminology, Marion Vannier joined the University of Manchester where she is now a senior lecturer in criminology and newly appointed UKRI Future Leader fellow. She is also a research associate at the University of Oxford, Centre for Criminology, Border Criminologies and The Imprisonment Observatory.

Marion's research is situated in the sociology of punishment, criminal law, and human rights. Since her book on life without parole in California, Marion continues to explore topics relating to life imprisonment, and to draw out the connections between legal frames and empirical carceral realities more broadly.