The lived sentence

Specific expectations of the sentenced person arise from the aims of sentencing, vague and philosophical though they are. Far from being a direct process of implementation, the sentence is mediated by correctional practices underpinned by a managerialist, risk-averse habitus. Considerations of risk and rehabilitation weave together to produce a focus on offence-specific programs, often at the expense of equally valid, rehabilitative pathways such as work and education. Yet the fundamental but unarticulated expectation that prisoners will undergo and demonstrate a process of internal transformation exemplified by the requirement of remorse, continues throughout the sentence. Remorse, it is argued, is foundational to the assessments of transformative success made by correctional staff throughout, but most intensively, at the end of the sentence.Determining therelationship between the sentencing process and the dominant discourses and practices of imprisonment in NSW requires attention to the experiences of the subjects of criminal justice dispositions. Semi-structured interviews with 30 medium to long term male prisoners who were morethan half way through their prison sentences were conducted. Their experiences of the in- court sentencing process and the incidents of imprisonment are analysed in the context of the managerialist, risk obsessed landscape of modern criminal justice practice in NSW. The subjectiveexpectations implicit in sentencing, imprisonment and parole are contextualised in the way these prisoners experience the sentence. Perhaps not surprisingly, prisoners framed their stories overwhelmingly in interpersonal terms. Their responses highlight the importance of relationships with other prisoners, staff and their families and friends as a foundational issue in the experience of the sentence.While it is recognised that no direct instrumental link exists between the largely philosophical aims of sentencing and the practice of imprisonment, it is argued that implicit expectations of personal, subjective transformation persist in the substratum of the sentence only to re-emerge as primary considerations at the point of eligibility for release. The gap between these expectations, (both of and by the prisoner) and the reality of imprisonment determines the extent to which the prisoner can be co- opted into the project of his own redemption