'A good life in prison': Everyday ethics in a prison holding young men

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Young men in prison have a particular position in the criminological and policy imagination. They are generally seen as both damaged and damaging, as people who are vulnerable to suicide and self-harm and simultaneously prone to violence and non-compliant behaviour. Politicians and practitioners increasingly describe them as neurologically undeveloped and emotionally and behaviourally immature, and argue that the criminal justice response to young adult criminality should be to help the perpetrators to develop into morally mature adults. The realisation of these aspirations becomes complex when young adults are imprisoned in institutions riven with stark power imbalances, profound deprivation and dense gang affiliations. This project will consider how young adults in prison themselves think about and enact their moral lives, and how they seek to engage in everyday ethics in the prison.The proposed project has four main research questions in mind. First, what do young male prisoners think a good life in prison looks like, and how do they live ethical lives while they are incarcerated? Second, how are their attempts to live a good life affected by the wider prisoner society, and how does the prisoner society act as a resource for or as a limitation to the good life? Third, in what ways are prisoners' moral lives shaped and stunted by the prison as an institution, and how do institutional attempts at moralisation intersect with prisoners' own moralities? And fourth, what relationship is there between prisoners' conceptions of the good life and desistance from crime?The research will involve a year-long ground-up ethnography of the young men held in a prison holding a large proportion of young men. It will begin with a period of participant observation, aiming to understand the small acts - such as lending someone a chocolate bar, going to the gym, or talking to family members on the telephone - which constitute everyday ethics. Around 60 semi-structured interviews will be conducted with prisoners about what it means to be and do good in prison. Around 25 long life-history interviews will also be conducted with prisoners, to understand the role played by imprisonment in prisoners' wider moral education. A 'Dialogue Group' with up to ten prisoners will be organised, which will facilitate fortnightly discussions of issues relating to ethics, power, identity and politics in the prison and beyond.This project will be at the forefront of a developing field in criminology and penology - a move towards ethics and its relevance for understanding criminal justice. It will offer the first detailed ethnographic description of everyday ethics in prison, will develop new theoretical concepts to describe the ethical dimension of imprisonment, and will complement existing, more conventional sociological studies of the prisoner world. Furthermore, it will inform policy and practice about a group who prison practitioners find difficult to manage, and will also prompt discussion among policymakers about the ways in which the prison can promote and enable a good life.