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CRJ0010.1177/1748895818818872Criminology & Criminal JusticeVannier

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Criminology & Criminal Justice

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DOI: 10.1177/1748895818818872
https://doi.org/10.1177/1748895818818872
extreme imprisonment journals.sagepub.com/home/crj

Marion Vannier
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.

Keywords
Emotions, ethics, letters, life imprisonment, prison research methods

Introduction
There is a nascent and fast-growing literature on LWOP (Appleton and Grøver, 2007;
Girling, 2016; Leigey, 2015; Ogletree and Sarat, 2012; 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 (Reiter, 2014; Rhodes,
2001; Simon, 2000; Wacquant, 2002). This article examines how to optimally investigate
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.

Corresponding author:
Marion Vannier, School of Law, The University of Manchester, Manchester, M13 9PL.
Email: marion.vannier@manchester.ac.uk
2 Criminology & Criminal Justice 00(0)

The argument is that prisoners’ letters can illuminate some of the most unspoken expe-
riences 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 schol-
arship, this article gives original insights on an innovative qualitative criminological
tool. It provides a reflective example of how letters can be collected, analysed and inter-
preted; highlights some of the emotional and ethical dimensions associated with working
with prisoners’ letters; and considers their benefits and critical challenges for the empiri-
cal study of prison, prison reform and theoretical penology.
This article is structured in five sections. The first part summarizes 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 col-
lected 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 article proposes
a detailed methodological and reflective outline for drawing on prisoners’ letters to aug-
ment understandings of extreme imprisonment.

LWOP’s Pixelated Image

To make the overall argument, this article draws on a case study conducted in California in
2014, which is summarized 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 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 pun-
ishment 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 (Henry, 2012; Villaume, 2005) 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 punish-
ment to the death penalty and to life imprisonment further thwarts appreciations of its
inherent severity. As scholarly accounts repeat that LWOP is worse than long-term incar-
ceration but not quite equivalent to the traditional death penalty, the very meaning of
Vannier 3

dying behind bars has waned and lost its horror. LWOP’s image has thus become rather
pixelated: some of its features remain indistinct while 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 incar-
ceration (Vannier, 2016). It did not employ a political conceptualization of death as per
Mbembé’s (2003) work nor did it rely on biological understandings of death, which in
the context of extreme punishments is generally associated with methods of executions
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, hold-
ing the third largest LWOP population (Nellis, 2017).
The main findings that inform the rest of this article are summarized 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 dehumani-
zation 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, par-
ents 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’ expe-
rience 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.

Uses of Prisoners’ Letters

While prison researchers and advocates regularly use prisoners’ letters to enhance theo-
retical 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 (Rubin, 2017b; Seal, 2014) 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., 2017), 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,
4 Criminology & Criminal Justice 00(0)

stated: ‘[d]ata 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 perspec-
tive 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 (2015: 24) relies on prisoners’ archived writings to focus on
the smaller, and everyday acts of resistance described as ‘frictions’. Corentin Durand
(2014) closely analyses complaints written by French prisoners to administrative authori-
ties 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 (Chamberlen, 2016; Scott, 1991) 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 contextualize and map out
penal trends. McLennan (2008) draws on letters to develop a history of imprisonment in
the USA and identifies two main episodes: the development of a large-scale prison labour
system in the 19th century and then a period of attempts to reform prison life to achieve
prisoners’ emancipation in the early 20th century (see also Meranze, 1996). Scholars not
only utilize prisoners’ testimonies to trace the past, they also use them to critically dis-
cuss new forms of incarceration, such as solitary confinement (Reiter, 2016a) or immi-
gration 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 (2012) report 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 19th-century last statements written by prisoners on death
row and found that reconstructing and sharing positive images with the public was essen-
tial 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’ tool-
kits, the research implement is rarely discussed explicitly. More specifically, these works
provide little guidance on how to find, collect and analyse 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.

Methods
I spent four months in California collecting relevant data and used the following mixed
methods: (1) a textual analysis of different sets of documents, including archival legisla-
tive texts; US and California case law, criminal and sentencing laws; death penalty
Vannier 5

abolitionist organizations’ policy documents; state statistics and reports; and prison
administrative rules and regulations; (2) 58 semi-structured interviews with legal practi-
tioners (prosecutors and defence lawyers), academics and prison advocates; and (3) 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 bar-
riers. 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 sys-
tem does not specify the sentence prisoners are serving (State of California Inmate
Locator, n.d.). 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 under-
standing 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 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 organization’s members and to inmates held inside his prison. Separately, I asked
the editor of the San Francisco 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 three 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
6 Criminology & Criminal Justice 00(0)

discussed by Bosworth et al. (2005: 255) and trigger reform. Gregory (59 years old,
white, Salinas)1 wrote ‘[p]erhaps someday, you can relay to the general public that a
convicted killer can change’.2
By May 2014, 327 men and women from different ethnic and age groups, incarcer-
ated 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 four
months. The size and variety of the sample illustrate how letters can overcome space,
time and cost barriers, and represent a wide range of experiences.

Analysis
To best capture prisoners’ experience of extreme severity, an exploratory, detail-driven,
multi-layered 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 transcrib-
ing 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 origi-
nated 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’ embod-
ied 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 Armstrong’s (2018) and O’Donnell’s (2014)
studies on the passing of time. In summary, five themes about death 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 ref-
erence 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 of the difficulty of grasping
Vannier 7

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 documen-
tary 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, RJ Donovan).
To clarify this point, I turned to California law and found that LWOP inmates were ineli-
gible for medical compassionate release even if they have less than six months to live,3
or for early parole if they become medically incapacitated.4 Comparing perspectives
allows for new and deeper understandings about penal severity to emerge; it also pro-
vides 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’ perspec-
tives (see Reiter, 2014).

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.5
Furthermore, this type of methodology can exclude certain testimonies. Letters bar illit-
erate prisoners from sharing their experiences. In 2017, three out of five people in US pris-
ons 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 while 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 correspond-
ence) and ‘enough paper’ to be determined by each institution.6 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
8 Criminology & Criminal Justice 00(0)

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 inspira-
tion. 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 per-
ceived 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 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, 130 S. Ct., 2011). 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 under-
standing 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. First, 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 under-
standing and reported in the personal language of each inmate’s usage (Dexter, 2006).
Like photographs, letters are also personalized 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
Vannier 9

the diversity and dissimilarities of their individual representations, as it does in the com-
monalities and shared understandings of their reality. Their perspectives are reliable pre-
cisely because they shed light on some things while missing others.
Second, letters are especially rich because they are such a familiar tool of communi-
cation. 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 pro-
vides 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 con-
ducted in prison 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 earlier (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 recognize prisoners’ vulner-
ability and mortality. It is because letters become, in the context of no hope, such powerful
testaments of prisoners’ humanity and 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.

Ethics and Emotions

Reflexivity is of paramount importance in qualitative research (Armstrong et al., 2017;
Sharpe, 2017), namely scrutinizing researchers’ positionality and reflecting on its effect
throughout the research process, and considering the possible contradictions from want-
ing 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 let-
ters provoke during the research process, without, however, delving into ‘self-indul-
gence’ (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 encour-
age inmates to share their views about hidden experiences (Bosworth et al., 2005: 254).
10 Criminology & Criminal Justice 00(0)

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
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 (2014) sent to the ODPP mailing list further stressed that
the study was about hearing their stories. I did, however, reply to the first 50 letters, thank-
ing 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 San Francisco BayView to share a letter thanking partici-
pants 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 acknowledgement 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 ano-
nymity of prisoner participants by concealing or modifying identifying information will
minimize risks of harm (Bachman and Schutt, 2016: 69). If prison researchers are gener-
ally requested to take steps to mask their participants, they are not compelled to do so
(Jerolmack and Murphy, 2017; Lahman et al., 2015). 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 Ethics further provides: ‘[r]esearchers 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: 11). In the USA, 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 else-
where. 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 (2012) wrote several op-eds and blog posts describing his
experience of LWOP in California high-security facilities. In some instances, it might
even be practically impossible for researchers to guarantee confidentiality. As Leo (1996:
126) 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).7 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
Vannier 11

prison staff.8 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 associa-
tion 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 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 iden-
tifying 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.9 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. In addition, 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 masking other identifying and humanizing information such as their
gender, age or ethnic origins (Wright et al., 2017). 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 (Beyens et al., 2013; Bosworth and Kellezi, 2017; Liebling,
1999; Reiter, 2014), or describe some of the physical discomforts from working in
locked-up conditions (Reiter and Koenig, 2018; Wacquant, 2002). For Reiter (2014), few
12 Criminology & Criminal Justice 00(0)

scholars in the USA 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 (Crewe, 2014; Farrant,
2014; Jewkes, 2012; 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 biog-
raphies (e.g. Wakeman, 2014). Emotions are not peripheral to the production of knowl-
edge, 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.
Unlike interviews, researchers who use inmates’ letters will not bear direct or visual
witness of interviewees’ suffering.10 In my experience, working with letters provoked a
sense of distanciation from participants’ experience, something that is common among
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 fascinat-
ing objects to study than with the difficulty processing others’ pain. Further, researchers
are accustomed to scrutinizing documentary data. Analysing letters felt familiar and
achievable. It was less daunting to read over 300 letters multiple times than it was to
conduct, 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’s11 are poignant and tangible evidence of participants’ human-
ity 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 iden-
tify and relate to one person’s pain (Boltanski, 2008; Capers, 2012; Cohen, 2001).
Prison researchers provide helpful guidance to address such emotions, such as devel-
oping strategies prior to fieldwork (Reiter and Koenig, 2018) or building community and
supportive networks (Bosworth and Kellezi, 2017; Liebling, 2014). Institutions like
Berkeley or Oxford 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’ testimo-
nies. Consequently, the analyses felt more focused and localized, 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. While in California I felt encouraged and proactive
Vannier 13

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 empiri-
cal source to enhance understandings of the most extreme yet inaccessible corners of penal
severity. It considers both letters’ methodological advantages (collection, analysis and find-
ings) 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 Farrant, 2014; Jewkes, 2012).
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, let-
ters make penal severity empirically more transparent. They shed new light on how
procedural and carceral treatments shape the denial of hope, and prompt a reconsidera-
tion of the rather Manichean ‘life’ and ‘death’ categorizations of penalties in the USA
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 inad-
equate and inappropriate to the study of human affairs’ (Ferrell, 2009: 1). While legisla-
tive 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 aboli-
tionists 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 utilize 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 confine-
ment (Ridgeway and Casella, 2012). Whether this development is experienced as
14 Criminology & Criminal Justice 00(0)

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 incar-
ceration 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 capac-
ity 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, Kate Silverstone 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.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

Notes
  1. Identifying information is discussed later.
  2. Other studies have found that prisoners participate in prison research to avoid boredom or
help society (Moser et al., 2004).
  3. CPC 1170 (e)(2)(C); see also 15 CCR 3076(b).
  4. CPC 3550(a) & (b)(1); see also 15 CCR 3359.1 (a)(3).
  5. In your own words, and in whichever style you wish to share it in, please describe your expe-
rience of LWOP. For example, you could describe:
•  what you see, feel, taste or hear,
•  what you find to be the most difficult part of your sentence,
•  what, if any, are some of the pleasures you experience,
•  what you find to be the hardest about your sentence, Physically? Psychologically?
•  who, if anyone, or what, helps you to cope with your sentence,
• the prison you’re currently held and whether it differs to any other prisons you have been
to.
  6. 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 10 sheets of
paper (54010.5, California Men’s Colony, 2014).
  7. 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).
 8. Rule 54010.8 (CDCR, 2018) provides that: ‘[a]ll non-confidential inmate mail, incom-
ing or outgoing, is subject to being read in its entirety by designated staff’. Only docu-
ments exchanged with lawyers or other officials are legally considered confidential (Rule
54010.12.1, CDCR, 2018).
Vannier 15

 9. I kept a separate subject enrolments log showing codes, names, pseudonyms and
locations.
10. Researchers describe how they witnessed interviewees crying or screaming in anger and frus-
tration (Bosworth and Kellezi, 2017; Liebling, 1999).
11. Few letters were typed.

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