Kafkaesque Incarcerated Existence: When life tragically imitates art

December 3rd this year marked the tenth anniversary of the supposed ending of one of the biggest and most damaging failures in criminal justice in England and Wales. It will be a decade since the abolition of a sentence which, early in its application, was labelled ‘kafkaesque’ because of its affects: the sentence of Imprisonment for Public Protection, or IPP.

Some years ago I read Frank Kafka’s The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926) and Amerika (1927 – Kafka’s unfinished first novel). When I transitioned vocationally from parish to prison ministry I was quickly struck by just how kafkaesque elements of incarcerated life were. However, this was not fiction but a daily lived experience for many of the over 80,000 persons held in custody at that time (2012 onwards). Kafka, trained in law, often wrote about characters trapped in legal and bureaucratic systems whose underlying institutional rationale or rules were unfathomable and frequently fickle. His depiction of an individual battling against a nightmarish situation, where bureaucratic process was paramount and humane regard attenuated, has spoken into the ‘modern condition’ of existential alienation and systemic dispassionate disregard (as powerfully represented for a UK audience in Ken Loach’s 2016 film I, Daniel Blake). It was especially helpful conceptually whilst ministering in penal contexts and pastorally informed my appreciation of the daily frustrations encountered by the men I served.

As I increasingly encountered men serving IPP sentences my awareness of the detrimental and often tragic effects of this especially kafkaesque existence became acute. Introduced in the 2003 Criminal Justice Act, the shortcomings of the IPP sentence were soon glaringly apparent. It was an indeterminate sentence without a specified endpoint (those serving it had “99 years” as the sentence length on their prison records). A ‘minimum tariff’ was given to a person convicted of a violent and/or sexual crime which had to be served. This was usually half the sentence their index offence (main crime) warranted. For the vast majority of determinately sentenced people this halfway point would be when they would be released into the community on licence conditions monitored by probation services. 

At their minimum tariff point those serving an IPP sentence would most likely continue in custody until a Parole Board could be satisfied their risk of reoffending was manageable in the community by probation services. Rehabilitative resources were severely lacking nineteen years ago and many people in custody on IPP sentences found themselves languishing in prison with the Parole Board / Probation Officers requiring they complete offending behaviour courses which frequently were unavailable. This created a frustrating psycho-emotional dynamic reminiscent of that depicted in Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel Catch 22 (made into a film in 1970).

Initial Home Office estimates suggested the IPP sentence would swell the prison population by approximately 900 places. From the first sentence being passed (2005) to its abolition in 2012, approaching 9000 people were given an IPP sentence. Before a serious revision of its terms in 2008 one of its biggest failings was the ridiculously short minimum tariffs being handed out (in many cases under 2 years). Waiting lists for offending behaviour courses were sometimes longer than the minimum tariff imposed. Many quickly found themselves being held not for the crime they had committed but for ones they might commit in the future (echoing the ‘precrime’ notion of the film Minority Report from 2002).

Although the IPP sentence was abolished ten years ago this was not applied retrospectively. In prisons across England and Wales there are still 1,442 people in custody on this indeterminate sentence that are past their tariff date but have never been released. Of those, 231 received a minimum tariff of less two years and 606 got between two and four years. In some cases these men and women are now stuck in the penal system due to deteriorating and behaviour-affecting mental health issues which are directly attributable to the despair-inducing nature of the indeterminacy at the heart of the IPP sentence. It is well established that being held in a perpetual liminal state of not knowing when or if ever a person will be released increases risks of self-harm and suicide.

One of the roles I undertook as a Prison Chaplain was as an ACCT Assessor. ACCT stood for ‘Assessment, Care in Custody and Teamwork’ and was an integrated multi-disciplinary approach to self-harm and suicide risks in the prison population. A memory that still haunts me from years ago is of a man on an IPP sentence who was significantly over tariff and in a desperate state of hopelessness. He was being monitored in accordance with the ACCT process and I was involved in his case reviews.  In pastoral conversations with him outside of the ACCT procedure he made no excuses for his crimes – which were serious – and frankly expressed profound regret. In my mind’s eye I can still see him in a case review, his psycho-emotional distress manifesting itself in physical spasms and nervous tics, presenting visually like the images of WW1 troops suffering with ‘shell-shock’ (PTSD). It is the most distressed I have ever witnessed a human being to be. I do not know what happened to him as shortly afterwards he was “ghosted” – physically removed early one morning from his cell without notice and transferred to another establishment.

Within ancient Judaea-Christian Wisdom literature is a warning and a hope concerning such kafkaesque conditions: “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life” (Proverbs 13:12). The seeking after human flourishing and the challenging of all that diminishes life is at the heart of the endeavours of practical theology. This, of course, must include acknowledgement of the detrimental impact of crime upon victims and social well-being. As an erstwhile prison chaplain I would never seek to condone or excuse crime, however deep my regard for the humanity of incarcerated souls. Nonetheless, robbing a person of hope traps them within a space of irredeemability (or at least that is the existential weight of indeterminacy felt by many held in such conditions). As Victor Frankl observed, we are creatures that need to find meaning and purpose, without such hope we are profoundly diminished (Man’s Search for Meaning, 1959).

A House of Commons Justice Committee review into the ‘IPP issue’ has recently published its report. It’s main recommendation to the UK government is that those serving an IPP sentence should be resentenced and the hope-corroding indeterminacy of their incarceration removed. Their report recognises the challenges involved in such a resentencing exercise, not the least being the investment of rehabilitative resources on a large-scale. My own ethnographic research amongst a group of IPP men – which has been peer reviewed by practical theologians, criminologists and penal practitioners – found that central to the nurturing and maintenance of hope behind bars is the quality of deep humane regard offered to those in our care and custody. Kafkaesque systems of mass incarceration are not conducive to the relationality that fosters both hope and humanity.

The best rehabilitative investment we could make as a society is in the humanising of modern systems of mass incarceration. Current political discourse about cuts in public spending suggests this will not be a priority. Prisons are always at the back of the queue behind schools and hospitals when it comes to the apportionment of public funds. This perpetual underfunding, exacerbated by an inevitable repeat of austerity cuts in the short- and medium-term, is further compounded by punitive populism where both politically ‘right’ and ‘left’ race to incarcerate to assuage ill-informed public opinion about how to deal with crime (see Marc Mauer’s work from The Sentencing Project).

At the heart of my reflections upon how this hope-corroding and humanity-diminishing form of incarceration can be addressed pastorally is the theological grammar of the incarnation. The tenth anniversary of the abolition of the IPP sentence will fall during the Christian church season of Advent, within which, amongst other themes, a prophetic cry for justice is pondered. It is a time of preparation for the Church, one full of expectant waiting for the coming of God in human form, bringing hope, humanity and healing to the world. Does hope always come in human form? Perhaps, but especially so for those who sit in the shadow of the darkness of existential indeterminacy.

Whilst no longer serving as a prison chaplain I remain committed to working with others in ridding our criminal justice system of what a former Supreme Court Justice described as a “stain” on our judicial reputation. The IPP sentence has experiential elements of the most nightmarish forms of fiction but remains the daily lived reality of thousands of people and their families. I pray the Justice Committee’s recommendations to the government will be acted upon speedily and appropriately rather than kicking this can another ten years down the road.

[For more on how to support individuals and families impacted by the IPP sentence contact UNGRIPP at https://www.ungripp.com]

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© David Kirk Beedon, 2022.

This work is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Cover Image: An image taken from author’s ethnographic enquiry into the lived experience of seventeen men serving an IPP sentence. It is in the style of a movie poster and represents one participant’s ‘life as a film’ (the life-history interview method used). Copyright is the author’s but the work was commissioned from and undertaken by Ralph Mann, a graphic artist.