Abstract
Based on a longitudinal study of life-sentenced prisoners in England and Wales, this article explores the disruptive impact of having a murder conviction on the re/integration of women lifers, once released into the community. As a way of understanding these challenges, it draws E Goffman's work on stigma, and critical scholarship on the ‘stigma machine’ and ‘stigma power’, to emphasise how the nature of the offence matters for women lifers post-release. In the shadow of extra-legal media narratives about their offence and personhood, which content, timing and audience they cannot anticipate or control, women lifers tried to negotiate their notoriety. This article explains the resulting ‘spoiled identity' that they felt was incongruous with their recent histories and self-narratives, but which loomed over them in unpredictable and long-lasting ways.
Introduction
[To] a certain extent I am protected in prison from what the rest of the world think, feel and say. On release I will have to deal with what the rest of the world feel they are entitled to tell me about what they think, feel and believe and how wrong I was and how bad I was. (Pat 1 , in prison)
[A] currently sustained life […] is threatened by what some others know about the individual's past or about the shady parts of [her] present. (Goffman, 1963: 98)
At the time of the interview, Pat was one-third into her minimum custodial term. Like all of the study participants, she was serving a mandatory life sentence for murder. In the above excerpt, Pat juxtaposed the prison with the outside world in terms of protection from public judgement of her action, which led or contributed to her victim's death, and her ethical selfhood. Despite many years left in custody, Pat anticipated that she would face distinct challenges after her eventual release from prison because of the nature of her offence, and the moral denunciation she expected it to elicit – challenges that she felt somewhat sheltered from by prison walls. Pat's remark seemed prescient in light of the experiences of those life-sentenced women (hereafter, lifers) in the study who had already been released into the community. Wilma, for example, who had been out in the community for several years at the time of her interview, stated that ‘You do feel safer in jail, because you, well, you just do. But out here, no. Because anyone could say anything about you’. Such comments should not be interpreted as minimising or denying the hardship and damage of long-term incarceration. Rather, they should push us to consider what can make the experience of life after life imprisonment so challenging that prison can be perceived – under specific circumstances – as the existentially safer alternative.
Drawing on data from a longitudinal study of mandatory life-sentenced prisoners in England and Wales, this article contributes to the sparse literature on life-sentenced women's experiences by describing the ways in which their convictions cast a shadow that adversely interfered with their post-release lives and identities, in the way Goffman (1963) describes in the epigraph above. In doing so, the article expands on the literature on criminal record stigma by highlighting the distinct impact of having a murder conviction on re/integration 2 . This moral landscape, I argue, is different from any other conviction. Notably, Tyler (2020: 110) has recently encouraged a critical rethinking of stigma, one that moves beyond Goffman's, which she argues ‘obfuscate[s] and naturalise[s] existing arrangements of power’ rather than recognising stigma as ‘always enmeshed with wider capitalist structures of expropriation, domination, discipline and social control’ (Tyler, 2020: 17).
This article contributes to this theoretical agenda by highlighting how the media can act as a ‘stigma machine’ (Tyler, 2020) that traps life-sentenced women in – and exacerbates – the intersecting forms of oppression to which criminalised women are subjected, and that interfere with their re/integration efforts (Barr, 2023; Sharpe, 2023; Williams et al., 2021). 3 Ultimately, the article demonstrates that while the women attempted to mitigate this ‘stigma power’ (Link and Phelan, 2014), the shadow of notoriety interfered with their efforts to re/integrate into the normative ‘moral community’ (Maruna and LeBel, 2003) from which they had long been absent.
Theoretical background
Over the years, scholarship on release and re/integration has grown considerably. Notably, there is remarkable consistency in terms of the kinds of challenges individuals face upon release from prison, such as community supervision (Khan, 2023), and stigma, shame and social exclusion (Dodge and Pogrebin, 2001; Pogrebin et al., 2015). However, there are important differences in the intensity of these problems for different groups. This section explores two that are particularly relevant for this article: individuals sentenced to long-term and life imprisonment (Appleton, 2010; Crewe, 2024; Liem, 2016) and criminalised women (Barr, 2023; Leverentz, 2014).
Long-term and life imprisonment
Adapting to the outside world after a period of confinement is especially difficult for long-term prisoners (Crewe, 2024; Liem, 2016). In addition to exacerbating the practical and relational challenges of re-entry, the length of time that lifers have been absent from the outside world compounds the psychological and existential ‘shock of release’ (Durnescu, 2019), contributing to feelings of being not only out of place, but also out of time (Liem, 2016; Munn and Bruckert, 2013). Recent work on lifers’ affective trajectories also demonstrates how overwhelming and unmanageable the emotional ‘boundlessness’ of life in the community can feel following an extensive period of ‘sedative coping’ in custody; that is, the ‘psychological numbing or suppression of painful feelings and experiences’, including feelings about their index offence (Crewe, 2024: 3).
Notably, lifers’ release trajectories are shaped in important ways by the offence itself (Rennie, 2024), with certain types of offences (e.g. sexual offences or murder) ‘stickier’ and harder to shed than others. First, they are harder to shed internally, as the convicted individual struggles to comprehend and reconcile their actions with their sense of self (Crewe et al., 2020). Most of the lifers in Crewe et al.'s (2020) study ‘sought to integrate their offence into their narrative of self’ such that ‘[b]eing a murderer became part of the life story, but—crucially—not its sole or central narrative’ (Crewe et al., 2020: 268, emphasis in original). To do so, for these men and women ‘coming to terms with the offence required a complex form of psychological adjustment: a distinction between actions and selfhood, and a need to honour the past without being swamped by a single episode and its moral implications, whatever their immensity’ (Crewe et al., 2020: 268). This necessary ‘adjustment’ or state of moral equilibrium may be disrupted upon release, as lifers face new challenges in the community that force them to contend anew with their offence, in ways that are less predictable and controllable than in custody (Munn and Bruckert, 2013; Rennie, 2024). One challenge is the potential dissonance between lifers’ present self-narratives, which result from reflexive identity development over their long-term incarceration (Crewe et al., 2020) and which remains largely invisible to the outside world, and the spectre of the social identity they left behind when incarcerated. Certain offences are also harder to shed externally, as convicted individuals face or anticipate moral judgement and exclusion across private and public spheres (Ievins, 2023; Rennie, 2024). Although the stigma of having a criminal conviction has been widely researched and written about (Martin, 2018; Miller and Stuart, 2017), arguably, the moral landscape of re/integration is distinct in case of murder. Indeed, as noted by Munn and Bruckert (2013: 112), more so than any other offence, ‘committing murder is read as revealing the person to be of a particular kind – act and actor are permanently fused’. This likely complicates the re/integration of such individuals.
Frequently drawing on Goffman's (1963) framework on stigma, a good deal of research has explored strategies for negotiating criminalised status in the community (LeBel, 2008, 2012; Winnik and Bodkin, 2008). Notably, stigma, and associated feelings of shame and humiliation, can encumber the kind of positive recognition and acceptance that contributes to re/integration (Pogrebin et al., 2015; Rubio Arnal and McNeill, 2023). Not only that, but not ‘being respected, accepted and recognised as more than the crime one had committed’ can have a detrimental impact on a person's self-worth and undermine their efforts at cultivating a non-offending identity (Koffeld-Hamidane et al., 2024: 188; Stone et al., 2018). As such, it is important to consider the different formal and informal factors that can exacerbate, prolong or expand how, when and where stigma and associated moral emotions are experienced and enacted, and how this influences identity, acceptance and belonging. Three important limitations in extant literature warrant special consideration in this respect.
First, penal scholars have highlighted the impact of legal or institutional narratives of the offence on re/integration, and on self-identity. McNeill (2019) proposes the idea of the ‘Malopticon’ – a metaphor for the ‘penal apparatus or process through which the [penal] subject is seen badly, is seen as bad, and is projected and represented as bad’ (McNeill, 2019: 109). In other words, the penal subject feels misrecognised, because these official narratives about them, and the identities they ascribe, are perceived as inaccurate and incongruous with their self-narrative (Crewe and Ievins, 2021; McNeill, 2019; Warr, 2020). Because the exploration of misrecognition has been limited to convicted individuals’ relationships with state authorities, the question remains whether it can occur in and through an extra-legal context, and in turn, whether the Malopticon extends beyond the network of formal penal institutions.
Second, previous studies have largely focused on the stigma of possessing a criminal record, while neglecting the nuanced impact of the type and circumstances of the offence. However, recent scholarship shows that circumstances of the offence shape life-sentenced men's approaches and experiences of re/integration: certain types of murder are easier to ‘move on’ from both personally and socially (Rennie, 2024). It is therefore important to consider how the nature of the offence can moderate the relative difficulty of re/integration.
Third, few studies have carefully considered the limitations to convicted individuals’ control over their self-narrative, especially in light of the online expansion and preservation of spaces of stigmatisation and public shaming (Lageson and Maruna, 2018; Rutter, 2021; Stacey, 2017). This context causes people ‘to question their own personhood and autonomy’ as they experience a violation of privacy, humiliation and uncertainty due to their stigmatised past being digitally archived and permanently discoverable (Lageson and Maruna, 2018: 125). Importantly, this can be especially challenging for women because patriarchal structures of oppression further restrict women's options for and control over self-narratives (Petrillo, 2023).
Criminalised women
Re-entry tends to be more difficult for criminalised women than men (e.g., Leverentz, 2014; O’Brien, 2001), because women experience higher rates of mental ill-health and addiction, victimisation and abuse, socio-economic marginalisation and stigmatisation within a structurally oppressive patriarchal system (Gålnander, 2020; Gjeruldsen et al., 2024; Petrillo, 2023; Sharpe, 2023; Tripodi et al., 2023). More attention should be paid, however, to how re-entry is influenced by the type and circumstances of the offence. Liem and Weggemans (2018) begin to fill this gap by drawing on interviews with men convicted of ‘high-profile’ offences, whose cases received considerable media attention. They found that being ‘high-profile’ exacerbates the challenges of re/integration because of the negative spotlight shed on these individuals and their networks. For women convicted of violent offences, this is likely to be even more acute, given the gendered nature of public perceptions about women's offending, rooted in essentialist and heteronormative ideas of ‘double deviance’ (Heidensohn, 1985) and the pathologisation of women's offending (Carlen, 1983), which are reflected in how the media reports on criminalised women (Barlow, 2015).
Indeed, media reporting on violence tends to demonise and vilify women more than men (Jewkes, 2015). Drawing on case studies of women convicted alongside male partners, Barlow (2015) describes the journalistic ‘silencing’ of women through reporting of court cases that prioritises sensationalism over accuracy and reinforces essentialist scripts by ‘misrepresenting [the women's] voice and perspective’ (Barlow, 2015: 481) or failing to include it entirely. Arguably, this can feel especially damaging and unjust in cases of co-offending women whose involvement in the offence is a result of – or defensive response to – coercion or abuse, often at the hands of a male partner or family member (Hulley, 2021). Feminist scholars have highlighted how the victimisation of women who ‘fail to meet the exacting standards of the ideal victim’ – for example, because they are also perpetrators – is diminished or dismissed, or blamed on the women themselves (Seaman and Lynch, 2023: 75). These narratives pervade social perceptions, but can also be ‘internalised by the women themselves’ (Seaman and Lynch, 2023: 77). Despite this, little remains known about the ways that women convicted of particularly serious violence navigate potentially inaccurate narratives about their offence or culpability. Even less is known about the long-term impact of such narratives on re-entry, many years after these narratives first emerged.
In fact, the experiences of life-sentenced women in particular, both in custody and community, remain largely ‘invisible’ (Vince and Evison, 2024). Yet, as previously mentioned, the intensity of challenges women face post-release tends to be greater than for men owing to additional obstacles to accessing fewer available, and often ill-suited, forms of support (Opsal and Foley, 2013); experiences of community supervision that reflect gendered forms of social control (McKendy and Ricciardelli, 2021); and greater levels of social stigmatisation and exclusion (Rutter and Barr, 2021; Sharpe, 2023). Criminalised women also tend to internalise offence-related stigma and to experience negative moral emotions such as guilt or shame (Masson and Österman, 2017).
This article contributes to existing literature by providing one of the first in-depth accounts of the lived realities of women lifers who have been released from prison and are on life licence 4 in the community, focusing on the way the (distorted) spectre of the offence interferes with life after life imprisonment. In foregrounding the offence in the analysis, the article extends previous accounts of navigating stigma and ‘spoiled identity’ in pursuit of ‘normality’ and anonymity (Munn and Bruckert, 2013). By focusing on the distinct moral landscape of re/integration for women convicted of murder, this article shines a light on how conflicting (moral) narratives of the offence can not only threaten ontological security and disrupt daily stability, but also hinder re/integration, and prolong punishment, potentially indefinitely.
Methods
The data I draw on for this paper were collected as part of a longitudinal, mixed-methods study of the experiences of women and men serving mandatory life sentences for murder in England and Wales. All participants were sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term (tariff) of 15 years. The first study took place in 2013–2014, comprising surveys as well as in-depth semi-structured interviews with incarcerated men and women at different stages of their life sentence (for a detailed description of the original study, see Crewe et al., 2020). The follow-up study was conducted between 2022 and 2023, and sought to survey and re-interview all the original participants, around 8–10 years after the first phase of fieldwork. The research team were able to re-interview 120 of the original 146 interviewees, 20 of whom were now on life licence in the community following their release from prison since the original study. This included 13 men and 7 women who were at various stages of re-entry at the time of the interviews, ranging from a few months to several years.
The community interview questions covered a number of core themes, including anticipation of release and the initial transition into the community, adaptation and coping outside, reflecting on the past and the future, perceptions of self/identity, relationships with people outside, and navigating life on life licence. The analysis for this article draws predominantly on these interviews with the seven women in the community, although sporadically I also draw on the in-prison interviews from the first study with the same women to refer to their previous experiences with the media or their anticipation of future media attention. Where quotes from the original in-prison interviews are used, this is clearly stated or denoted as ‘T1’.
The number of women serving life sentences in England and Wales is relatively small, and the number of women lifers released into the community every year is significantly smaller. In fact, since 2015, the number of women serving mandatory life sentences who have been released in any given year has not exceeded 23 (Ministry of Justice, 2023), and some of these figures could be re-releases after recall into custody. Given the size of this population and the notoriety of several participants, to protect their identities, I have not included any demographic information about the women in the sample. Given the subject matter of this article, the irony of this ethical decision is not lost on me. However, while concealing or altering details of their characteristics or circumstances that could risk their identification, I make every effort to convey the women's experiences as accurately as possible. The women in the sample were at various stages of re-entry, ranging from a few months to several years. Such a cross-section has shown that the challenges described, which were experienced across the sample, are not temporally bounded – rather, they can re-emerge irrespective of how much time has passed since release.
In my role as a research assistant on this project, I was not involved in data collection, and all interviews I rely on for the analysis were conducted by two other members of the research team. My responsibility was primarily contributing to coding the interview data using NVivo software. The themes discussed in this article emerged inductively from multiple readings of the interview transcripts. During this process, it became clear that being revealed to have spent a long time in prison and being seen or recognised as notorious because of their murder conviction were prominent concerns in the women's post-release narratives – concerns that they sought to mitigate in various ways. After reading the transcripts in full, I delved into specific codes that I thought would be most relevant. The concept of stigma visibility and the role of the media struck me as an analytical hook when the following quote caught my attention: ‘I think sometimes when she feels a bit invisible […] she makes herself visible again via the press’ (Meg). Here, Meg uses this term to describe the capacity or function of the press to make another woman's murder conviction publicly visible – a choice on the convicted individual's part. However, as I subsequently describe, the women in this study hardly had a choice in how the media portrayed them, limiting their control over their self-narratives and post-release lives. In what follows, I explore the mechanisms through which the women's stigmatised status as convicted ‘murderers' was made more or less publicly visible and the implications of this on their lives and identities.
Ethics and consent statements
This research received ethical approval from the Cambridge Institute of Criminology Ethics Committee and from His Majesty's Prison and Probation Service National Research Committee. Written informed consent was obtained from all participants.
Women's lives after life imprisonment in the shadow of notoriety
Involvement in someone's death had a significant impact on the women's selfhood, but few saw their status as a former long-term prisoner or a ‘murderer’ as their core self-identity (Crewe et al., 2020). This is in part because many women in this study convicted alongside co-defendants did not commit the fatal act itself. Following complex processes of personal growth that began in prison (Crewe et al., 2020), the women narrated distance between the past and the present, and between who they were and what they had done or been involved in, “It was a terrible, horrible, horrible, horrible thing and no, I shouldn’t be able to forget it, but like I do like, yeah, try and distance myself from it because like I just see that as a different person.” (Wanda)
Echoing findings from Crewe et al.'s (2020) earlier analysis about the ‘adjustment’ that lifers make to cope with the implications of their offence on their ethical selfhood, Daphne, now released, reaffirmed the separation between her past action and her selfhood: [T]hat was something I did, but that isn’t who I am. And I, for a long time […], I was always only ever going to be a murderer. But being outside and meeting [laughs] what I always thought was normal people, they made me realise that actually, that it doesn’t, my action doesn’t make me that kind of person. […] And people who ask, when [loved one] goes down the pub without me, they say “Where's Daphne? Haven’t seen Daphne in ages, how's she doing?” so that shows that these people who don’t know [pause] what I did, they see me for me, they see the person I am on the inside. (Daphne) [T]he way people just accepted me without even knowing about my past. I mean, when I came out […] everyone just accepted me. They never asked questions as to why my aunt's lived down here for near enough five years, and they’ve never met me… none of that. They just took me for who I was.
Such positive recognition helped foster a sense of acceptance and belonging (Gålnander, 2020). Although important for re/integration (Rubio Arnal and McNeill, 2023), for the women this was neither a linear nor a fully controllable process. Even when they attempted to or partially succeeded at cultivating social identities and lives beyond their status as convicted 'murderers', the women were unable to fully shed their past or contain its repercussions.
Media narratives and misrecognition
Unlike the misrecognition typically generated by legal or institutional narratives and existing within the context of individuals’ relationship with state actors (Crewe and Ievins, 2021; McNeill, 2019; Warr, 2020), the media narrative has been underexplored. 6 Yet, as this section illustrates, continued portrayal as a ‘murderer’ in the media, often years after the offence occurred, could generate a sense of misrecognition among those women who did not identify with or accept this label (McNeill, 2019). This was especially acute for those women convicted under the legal doctrine of Joint Enterprise (Hulley, 2021; Hulley et al., 2019) who had reportedly not committed the Criminal fatal act. Wanda said, ‘I’m not guilty of murder, because somebody else killed [the victim]’; similarly, Meg said, ‘Do I like being labelled “murderer”? Not really, no, because I haven’t killed anybody. If I’d killed somebody, okay, yeah, I could take that on the chin.’
This sense of misrecognition correlated with feeling misrepresented, as the media narratives were not only inflected with simplistic moral evaluations that caricaturised the women (Barlow, 2015; Rutter, 2021), but also felt distorting and degrading to them (McNeill, 2019). In their original interviews, Daphne, for example, observed that a documentary about her index offence was ‘over-dramatised’ (T1), while Wilma commented how inaccurate the press reporting of her case had felt: ‘speculation, but they were still putting it in the news like it did happen’ (T1). Wilma perceived this as a sinister misrepresentation of facts that deviated not only from her own narrative but also the court narrative (Barlow, 2015).
Misrecognition and the ‘Google’ effect
Some women experienced or anticipated their ‘spoiled identity’ becoming publicly visible if/when the press portrayed them as ‘murderers’ – an emotive message that anchored the women to their offence in the public eye. This left little room for public recognition of the women's personhood beyond their conviction, and for a second chance at life after having served their custodial punishment that was not defined by their stigmatised status.
Sylvie's case had received a lot of negative media attention over the years. Having been out in the community for a few months, she expressed relief that ‘the public don’t know that I’m out’ yet, especially after previous attempts at contact by the press prior to release. After more than 15 years in custody – and longer since her offence – Sylvie was anxiously waiting to become the target of negative media attention once again: ‘With the media side of things, since I’ve been out, I’ve been waiting for the big onslaught’. This anticipation aggravated the process of re-entry by adding uncertainty and a sense of powerlessness to an already precarious and challenging period (‘it was scary, apprehensive, but really exciting’ [Sylvie]).
Like Sylvie, who admitted to – and later regretted – Googling herself after release, many of the women were ‘Googleable’, meaning that their past was archived and accessible online. Although the scope of the women's notoriety varied – some were actively targeted by newspapers or journalists and others were harassed by work colleagues or private citizens on social media – its impact on the women's pursuit of a ‘normal’ life and ‘unspoiled’ identity was universally corrosive. Drawing attention to the ‘Google’ effect (Stacey, 2017), Daphne described the difficulties she had faced with co-workers at a previous job: ‘[T]he company I worked for […] I was the black sheep when I got the job there because everybody knew I was in prison, everybody Googled my name.’ A key challenge of being the ‘black sheep’ was that Daphne felt many of her colleagues refused to see her as more than a ‘murderer’, no matter how hard she tried to show that she was more than that – at the very least, a good employee and colleague. The potency of her notoriety and the corresponding ‘spoiled identity’ was one she ultimately could not control, despite her efforts to move beyond it: ‘It was hard because I would try and have conversations with people and be me, but all people would see was the crime that they had read about’ (Daphne). Being only seen in terms of her offence while the rest of her personhood was invisible to others was incompatible with her present sense of self. In McNeill's (2019: 209) terms, she was both ‘seen badly’ and ‘seen as bad’ – misrecognised – not just in the criminal justice context, but in the extra-penal context of a workplace. Notably, Daphne had been working a second job at the same time. There, she was not concerned about her notoriety in the same way, because the clients she worked with daily ‘did no Googling’. This second job, then, was a welcome space of anonymity, where she was not defined in terms of her ‘spoiled identity’.
Similarly, Kim, who managed a local business, had been the target of bullying from her colleagues who became aware of her status via Google. Although Kim had received support from other colleagues, she no longer wanted to come into work and recalled feeling that she could no longer pretend that everything was okay. Although Kim described re-entry as undeniably challenging, it had been devoid of major difficulties up to this point. In fact, following an adjustment period, she had found herself settling down with a partner, leading a relatively full social life, employed full-time, and living in a house that felt like home. Yet, despite being in a secure place personally and professionally, Kim was suddenly faced with the disruptive consequences of her notoriety. Kim had been out of prison the longest among our sample. Evidently, re/integration is contingent on the flow of information about the women's past, which they cannot always predict or control, and which can disrupt their existence even many years after release.
While Kim and Daphne's notoriety was largely contained to their workplace, it was more widespread for Meg. Since becoming a media target after release, Meg had experienced ongoing media harassment and abuse from members of the public, including death threats. She observed that members of the general public only cared about her past ‘when the press care’, but this interest was frequent and persistent, which resulted in ‘a lot of people saying they were going to come and find me […] there were a lot of threats’. Consequently, Meg had been forced to change jobs multiple times. As she states, not only did notoriety threaten her financial security and emotional and mental well-being, it also made her feel vulnerable, and put her physical safety at risk: ‘I felt more vulnerable just because it had been splashed all over the papers, it was all over the internet.’ As a result, Meg's sense of safety became contingent on anonymity, which she had enjoyed during a previous visit to a large city: ‘But strangely, I loved it because I just felt anonymous. [City] makes me feel anonymous, and I feel a kind of safety within that.’
Meg wanted to reprise this feeling of anonymity by moving permanently. While relocating to a new city might be necessary for self-protection and self-preservation, it would also be physically and existentially disruptive. Furthermore, there is no guarantee of succeeding in the pursuit of anonymity in a different geographic area, especially given the global nature of the Internet. This has ‘amplified this dramatically’ (Lageson, 2017), making public access to criminal histories – or media accounts thereof – ‘accessible at a keystroke to any curious user of the web’ (Corda and Lageson, 2020: 248). Yet as Lageson (2017: 36) notes, those affected are generally ‘powerless to pursue […] grievances in the extra-legal, online setting’.
Echoing previous findings (Lageson and Maruna, 2018; Rutter, 2021), the women's notoriety entailed a loss of control over what information was available about them and who it was made available to. This diminished the overall level of control the women had over their post-release lives, because the precise timing and implications of their notoriety were unpredictable. This manifestation of ‘stigma power’ (Link and Phelan, 2014) evokes features of the ‘tightness’ characterising contemporary penal power, whereby information written on file about prisoners can have ‘prolonged and deferred’ consequences, making it very difficult to predict or control, and generating feelings powerlessness and anxiety (Crewe, 2011: 518). Moreover, although this information is often perceived by prisoners as inaccurate, in that it misaligns with their version of what happened, it is the supreme account that over-writes their self-conceptions. Despite having a strong sense of self that was not centred around her offence, Meg expressed a fear that others would defer to her portrayal as a ‘murderess ringleader’ (T1) in the press, particularly online, to form their opinions of her. Her sense of powerlessness and fear of misrecognition is evident below: I think my biggest fear is their response to identifying – somebody else's response. It's not being identified per se because I know who I am; it's other people and their perceptions, and the whole bullshit of newspapers and stuff. Because straight away, everybody will go on Google. […] Google, straight away. (Meg)
Stigma visibility and belonging
Not all participants experienced such public notoriety. Some women's struggles with public visibility of their stigmatised status were more insulated and quotidian, but still with significant consequences. In particular, being seen through the lens of a ‘spoiled’ past jeopardised the women's sense of belonging in the community, and their desire to become ‘an indistinguishable part of the social fabric’ (Munn and Bruckert, 2013: 105).
The complex and liminal dynamics of belonging are exemplified in the account of Wilma, who had been out of prison for several years. Although she had faced numerous difficulties since her release, Wilma described being in a more ‘stable’ place at the time of the interview, in large part because of the relational support she was receiving. Yet, when asked about whether she felt like she belonged outside, Wilma said: Oh jeez, I don’t know. Yes and no. Sometimes I do, but then other times, like, I don’t know, I can’t explain it. I’m not sure. If it's someone in authority that knows me, knows my past and stuff, like with… I don’t feel like I belong. But say if I’m just like, I don’t know, going to the shop […], like, nobody knows me, so I do feel kind of like I belong. Not a hundred per cent, but….
Indeed, such feelings could be partly mediated. Attempting to reconstruct a timeline for her developing sense of belonging outside, Wilma stated emphatically that she ‘one hundred per cent felt like [she] didn’t belong’ when she was first released, into a hostel. She identified moving out of the hostel into her ‘first place’, followed by getting a job, as the first time she felt she belonged in the community. Achieving these milestones was an acquisition of ‘disidentifiers’ (Goffman, 1963) or symbols of ‘normality’ that not only solidified Wilma's sense of self as more than her past/offence, but also made her stigmatised status less discernible to others, potentially leaving room for the emergence of an ‘unspoiled’ social identity.
The absence of ‘disidentifiers’ was also important to Wanda's sense of belonging and selfhood. At the time of the interview, Wanda had been in the community for several years. Despite living a relatively settled life, she stated: I try not to meet new people […] because how do [I] say why I haven’t got a passport, why I’ve never been on holiday, why I’ve got a big chunk of my life that's missing? Like, I don’t wanna tell people that, but then I don’t wanna lie to people at the same time. […] But I think before, possibly, inside, I wasn’t like that because I didn’t need to hide.
This quote captures Wanda's fear of being identified as an imposter in the community. Specifically, Wanda feared that the absence of certain ‘disidentifiers’ might alert others to a ‘differentness’ about her, potentially leading to uncomfortable questions that would reveal her stigmatised status and the moral ‘stain’ it carried (Ievins, 2023). It is also worth noting Wanda's dilemma about disclosing her past to others: lying to conceal her past could be damaging to Wanda’ integrity, and could threaten her social re/integration (Gålnander, 2020). Moreover, having certain ‘disidentifiers’, for example job security, might not always be sufficient to maintain a sense of ‘normality’ and belonging, especially when individuals are unable or afraid to account for glaring gaps in their history. Thus, the fear and potential consequences of her ‘spoiled identity’ becoming publicly visible threatened Wanda's sense of belonging and self-identity, leading her to minimise this risk through ‘non-socialisation’ (Rennie, 2024). Notably, too, Wanda contrasted this state of precarity in the community with the comfort of feeling morally unjudged and indistinguishable while in prison, among a cohort of individuals who were collectively stigmatised.
Daphne likewise contrasted her vulnerability to the stain of her offence in prison and the community, although in her case it was the former context in which she felt more judged and exposed: When you’re in prison […] you would hear people whispering about you, or you’d hear people whispering about other people. ‘Oh, you know what they’re in for?’ I don’t have to worry about that. I can walk up that road and I can […] start a conversation with somebody on the bus and they don’t look at me and think ‘Oh, she's a murderer’.
Negotiating offence-related stigma and notoriety
Having described the way public visibility of their stigmatised status interfered with the women's lives, I now turn to the strategies they used to negotiate this, which demonstrate the women's efforts to exercise agency within the ‘stigma machine’ that seeks to curtail it and uphold their marginalisation (Tyler, 2020). I focus on two strategies: one that was about creating or immersing oneself in conditions where stigma visibility was not undesirable; and a second that involved (re-)gaining power through controlling their self-narrative in ways that facilitated temporary anonymity.
Shared stigma
Some stigmatised individuals seek out relational circles of likewise stigmatised others, where there is little or no pressure to either compensate for or conceal one's stigmatised status (Goffman, 1963). Much of this article has focused on the undesirability or danger of the stigma of a murder conviction being (made) visible. Yet, some of the women cultivated relationships or entered spaces where some kind or degree of stigma visibility was safe and desirable.
Several women described cultivating friendships with women they had met while in prison, some of whom were also lifers. These relationships were not only crucial sources of support, but also provided a safe space for being themselves without fear of judgement or rejection, in ways similar to how some participants had felt in prison. Wilma explained that what helped maintain her bond with some of the women she met inside was ‘what you’ve been through together’. Similarly, Kim stated that with ‘the people that you’ve met in prison, that you stay in touch with outside, it's an unspoken loyalty […] you know if you ever need to talk about it, they are there’. Sylvie also discussed the close-knit friendship group made up of her and a couple of other women lifers who were now all in the community. Her probation officer recognised those relationships as ‘pro-social’, allowing them to continue and flourish, providing a safe and supportive space, off and online. Sylvie was also a member of Alcoholics Anonymous: a group where everyone shared a particular ‘spoiled’ identity (albeit not that of a convicted ‘murderer’), meaning that there was no need to hide her own. This was clearly important to Sylvie's well-being: ‘[I]f I am feeling down or low, or I need to talk to somebody that understands that part of my life, I’ve got them I can talk to.’
These relational spaces provided solace or a kind of ‘moral refuge’ 7 : outside them, the women had to defend against becoming negatively visible because of their ‘differentness’ (Goffman, 1963). Furthermore, this similarity could be the foundation of supportive, accepting relationships, and membership of such a group could provide comfort even if the details of the stigma were not revealed. As such, stigma visibility – when chosen and controlled in this way – could be desirable, and yield positive outcomes.
‘Information control’
In line with previous research, the women in this study described strategies of social withdrawal as a way to negotiate visibility. Wilma's probation officer told her that she had to disclose her conviction ‘even [to] friends’. She understood the need to disclose her conviction to her partner, which she did with little hesitation at the start of their relationship. However, when she finally made a new friend and was instructed by probation to inform them of her past too, Wilma decided to break off the friendship rather than make this disclosure. In fact, Wilma said that ‘I haven’t made any friends […] at all’. Similarly, Wanda's fear of being identified not merely as an imposter, but as morally ‘stained’ through her offence (Ievins, 2023), compelled her to ‘try not to meet new people’. Through this avoidance, she minimised interactions that could force her to reveal more of her past. This created a catch-22, whereby disclosure was legally required to avoid being recalled back to prison, but would also jeopardise their position in the normative moral community (Gålnander, 2020; Maruna and LeBel, 2003; Pogrebin et al., 2015). Meanwhile, in an effort to gain some control over the trajectory of her post-release life, Sylvie took steps to delay what she felt was inevitable press attention by making her social media (Rutter, 2021) as private and anonymous as possible: ‘Like on [social media], I’m only an avatar and the only people who get to see my pictures are those who are my friends and family, so that's it.’
Another method of ‘information control’ (Goffman, 1963) through which the women tried to negotiate anonymity, and by extension their social identity, was changing their name. Of the seven women in our sample, five were using a different name from the one attached to their conviction in their daily post-release life. Some women were especially committed to this strategy. Wilma explained that when she was beginning to search for work outside, she was advised to use a different name from the one under which she was convicted. Kim also resorted to using a different name in some aspects of her daily life, such as work, explaining that she wanted to keep her past ‘separate’ from her present. However, neither Kim nor Meg were successful in this pursuit of anonymity once the media interfered in their lives. For those women whose past was indefinitely preserved, publicly accessible, or actively publicised, pre-emptive efforts to control information and their notoriety were futile, as media narratives – both old and new – took over and could no longer be controlled, reinforcing the potency of the media's ‘stigma power’ (Link and Phelan, 2014).
Daphne was an interesting outlier among this group in terms of decisions about name-changing. When asked why she did not change her name despite her notoriety, she said: At the end of the day, I committed a crime, and especially now with social media, it's going to be all over the place. […] I can’t fight it, I had an opportunity to change my name before I left prison – […] I thought about it, I did think about it, I even picked a name. [Pause] But I then thought to myself ‘You can’t hide from who you are. Just because you change your name does not change who you are’. (Daphne) You’re not allowed to move on from it. I know I’m a lifer, I’m always going to be a lifer, but I’m not allowed to just get on with life. And I would have thought, somebody getting out, getting a job, getting on, wouldn’t that make more sense than […] being harassed out of work on more than one occasion? (Meg)
Conclusion
Despite a growing literature on pathways of criminalised women exiting custody, more research is needed to explore the heterogeneity and complexity of women's post-release trajectories. This article contributes to this agenda by illuminating the often-invisible experiences of life-sentenced women (Vince and Evison, 2024) and their lives after custody. It further contributes to a growing body of scholarship that is concerned with ‘moral issues’ in criminology (Bottoms and Jacobs, 2023) by focusing on the moral landscape of re/integration for women convicted of murder. It does so by describing how the women's lived realities were shaped and disrupted by the nature, narratives and (mis)perceptions of their offence and conviction, often many years after release. It shows that, once in the community, the women had to navigate a kind of moral visibility, whereby their actions and personhood were at risk of being questioned and evaluated through the lens of their ‘master status’ (Hughes, 1945) and the distinctive moral condemnation it elicited once revealed.
At the start of this article, I urged us to consider what factors emerge during release that expose people to threats in the community from which they were protected in custody. I argue that notoriety is one such factor, impacting women lifers’ desire and capacity to cultivate both a new self-identity that is not anchored to their index offence and a ‘normal’, safe, secure life that allows them to meaningfully contribute to society after a long period of suspended citizenship. Crucially, this occurred beyond the women's interactions with the state, extending into private and public spheres through extra-legal mechanisms of media narratives and notoriety. Consequently, the moral condemnation, shame and humiliation the women were subjected to because of their particular conviction was spatially boundless, continuing to trap them in the ‘stigma machine’ (Tyler, 2020) they fought hard to escape.
Furthermore, some of the women had been out of prison for a number of years when they encountered these problems. This suggests that there might not be an expiration date on notoriety and ‘Googleability’, meaning that the ‘murderer’ label is indefinitely sticky. In many ways, the mechanisms and effects of notoriety are redolent of some important aspects of contemporary penal power, which for women tends to take on a paternalistic shape that reflects gendered forms of social control (Carlen, 1983). Its key features or frustrations include the sense of uncertainty about how and when power is exercised, being portrayed on file ‘in ways that over-write [prisoners’] subjective identity’ (Crewe and Ievins, 2021: 49), and the ‘highly adhesive’ nature of these (mis)representations, whose effects are often perpetual, delayed, and unpredictable (Crewe, 2011). The sense of anxiety and uncertainty from anticipating or experiencing notoriety, the fact that it could rear its head at any point with unpredictable and long-lasting consequences, the sense of misrecognition it generated, and the fact that it was largely uncontrollable are all features of ‘tight’ penal power (Crewe, 2011). In this case, however, they result not from official practices but from media reporting and information accessible through publicly available sources. As such, the power of the media over information about the women and their lives post-release represents an extra-legal form of power that mirrors and compounds the formal modes of power to which all lifers are subjected to in prison (Crewe, 2011; Warr, 2020), and while on licence in the community (Appleton, 2010; McNeill, 2019).
Given the trajectories of the women in this study, it seems that even when most of the components necessary for successful re/integration are present, the moral landscape of release for individuals convicted of murder poses additional barriers. Future research should explore how these mechanisms are gendered and racialised, for example. In highlighting notoriety as one such barrier, I hope to extend existing conversations to consider the need for additional mechanisms of support or protection that could curb the kind of indefinite informal punishment brought on by extra-legal forms of power such as the one this article describes. In doing so, I raise a broader question: are life-sentenced women ever able to fully conceal or shed their past and ‘master status’, and lead the ‘normal’ lives they desire? or will their offence and notoriety cast an unpredictable but unremitting shadow on the rest of their lives?
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
First, I want to thank all the women who generously shared their stories with the project team. I am beyond grateful to Ben Crewe and Susie Hulley for their guidance, feedback and valuable discussions that shaped this article. Huge thanks also go out to Ailie Rennie, Ariadne Fischer and Claudia Vince for their insights and comments on earlier drafts. Last but not least, I want to acknowledge Serena Wright's immeasurable contribution to the LTP project, alongside Ben and Susie.
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
This work was supported by the ESRC [ES/J007935/1, ES/T005459/1] and the Isaac Newton Trust.
