Finishing Time, i-Poems and 'the pains of release' into the community after punishment

Abstract

Criminalised individuals remain one of the most vilified, marginalised and excluded social groups. This is particularly felt and enacted on release from prison, yet limited attention is paid to the lived experience of the ‘pains of release’ and to the narratives of former prisoners. ‘Finishing Time’ is a two-year project (2018-2020), funded by a discretionary grant from the Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF), that aims to explore the lived experience of resettlement into the community after punishment. Overall, the research has become focused on how individual identities are formed through storytelling without assuming that identities are fixed or stable. It aims to explore how individuals develop narrative reinterpretations of the self in relation to criminalisation and/or multiple traumas through a form of collaborative connective labour, which consists of the doing of timelines, contributing photographs and the reading of ‘i-poems’. To date through a series of in-depth interviews, ten men have mapped their resettlement journeys using images and/or photographs and drawing timelines to help organise their memories and encourage a temporal sense of how their lives may have changed.