Life after life: going free

Towards the end of Alan Lord's blisteringly honest account of his prison experiences he makes a pertinent reference, when preparing for his eventual release, to the added challenges presented by the different approaches to resettlement he experienced from probation staff. 

When I was reading Lord’s book it had a particular resonance with my own professional supervisory relationship with Denis (not his real name), prior to his release from serving a mandatory life licence for murder. I had been allocated through care responsibility (as his home probation officer) as he had expressed an interest in moving into the local area (the scene of his index offence was in a different part of the country).

The initial correspondence from Denis did not offer much by way of measured insight into how he viewed his plans to resettle into the community after more than a decade inside. Furthermore, I reflected on the understandable reticence he might experience, in opening up after many years without any formal probation contact.

I arranged to visit him in open conditions as he had been assessed as 'low risk' by the Parole Board, and he was now beyond his tariff date (that part of the life sentence which he was required to serve before release could be safely considered).

There remained some residual concerns as to his ability to cope unaided once released. My meeting with Denis at the prison was remarkably informal, in the sense that the open conditions fostered a minimum security environment and so the meeting (held in one of the offices reserved for prison probation staff) went well. Denis, although unversed in the particular strictures that informed the supervision of life sentence prisoners once released, did offer his own observations as to how he envisaged his future on the 'outside’. He was guarded about my challenging enquiries as to his index offence (committed while he was intoxicated) and the proper role in liaising with victim services to alert the family of his victim of his release plans.

The fact that he was already accustomed to 'town visits' in the neighbouring area to the prison, and was undertaking a number of pre-release training schemes that appeared to consolidate some of the noted vocational skills he had acquired, appeared to offer the right ingredients of a safe transition to eventual release. I liaised with my probation colleagues at the prison and a follow up visit was duly arranged which would now include my senior probation colleague at the prison. At this meeting Denis provided every indication that he has accepted the gravity of his conviction and offered his perspectives which offered a measure of remorse for the harm incurred and the wilful death of one of his former workmates. It proved more difficult to discern just how he might benefit from a victim awareness course that the prison had recently introduced, as he felt he needed to 'move on' with his life and seemed to want to distance himself from his offending. We agreed that he would be referred and that once a vacancy arose he would be placed on this course, which had been mooted by the parole board as an aspect of pre-release work that remained partially unaddressed.

My subsequent correspondence with Denis remained fitful, simply due to his expressed desire to await his next sentence review date, as this would be pivotal to fixing a release date and securing suitable accommodation. As I made my way to a third planned pre-release meeting at the prison, I picked up an intuitive sense from telephone contact with one of my probation colleagues, that Denis might falter and abscond, due to what was assessed as his unanticipated desire to detach himself from any further offending-related courses and some of his gnomic references to 'going back to his roots'.

The meeting proved to be uncharacteristically terse and tense and I left the prison with a mild premonition that Denis had already made a decision, so close to his release date, that was out of accord with the agreed supervisory planning already set in motion. Catherine Appleton, in her important study of discretionary life sentence prisoners and the critical factors that support or undermine successful resettlement and reintegration, alludes to the differential supervisory styles of probation officers and how these might shape and influence decisions to recall to custody those lifers now living in the community on licence as a result of breach action.

I remember the telephone call from the prison after the meeting, informing me that Denis had indeed 'absconded' when he failed to return from a planned town visit. He later sent a post card to the prison, explaining that he was now living 'abroad' and, although he was now a lifer 'at large', he expressed the view that what had prompted his decision to abscond was that he could not contemplate being turned down for his final release but wanted 'Mr Guilfoyle to know that he learned his lesson!'.