I spent 48 years in prison for a murder I didn’t commit. Here’s how I fought my way to freedom
This article is more than 1 year old‘They haven’t even said they’re sorry’ … Glynn Simmons. Photograph: Scott Slusher/The Guardian
Glynn Simmons was released last year after almost half a century behind bars. Now 70, he describes his torment and terror as he battled to overturn one of the worst miscarriages of justice in US history
Glynn Simmons had been in Oklahoma for six days when he was arrested on suspicion of robbery. He was 21, he didn’t have a criminal record and the police had no obvious reason to pick him up that day in 1975.
The robbery victim didn’t recognise him; Simmons was told he was free to leave. Just as he was about to be released, however, the police told him that they were short of men for a lineup and asked him to take part. Simmons didn’t know that it was within his rights to refuse. His mother had taught him the importance of respecting officialdom. So, dutifully, he took part. It cost him dearly.
Simmons was later charged with the murder of a 30-year-old liquor store worker, Carolyn Sue Rogers, who had been shot in the head during a separate robbery. Along with Don Roberts, he was convicted and sentenced to death, later reduced to life imprisonment. In July 2023, he was released, before being exonerated in September. In December, he was legally declared innocent of the crime. Simmons, now 70, had spent 48 years, five months and 13 days in prison – the longest time anyone in the US has been jailed before being cleared.
“You used the term miscarriage of justice,” Simmons says in his sonorous voice. “But what happened to me wasn’t a miscarriage of justice where they simply got it wrong. What happened to me was deliberate. There’s another title for that.” Is there a term he prefers? “Yes. Attempted murder.” Simmons says it is attempted murder because the police knew he would receive the death penalty if found guilty.
We are talking on a video call. Simmons is a handsome man with an easy smile that belies his horrific experience. He talks with warmth about his childhood as one of 13 kids in a close family in Louisiana. Simmons tells me he was a poor student and dropped out of school at 14. By 21, he and his partner had a three-year-old son, Glen. At this point, Simmons moved from New Orleans to Oklahoma for work.
He says you have to understand the mood in Oklahoma City to begin to make sense of what happened to him. It was a place seething with racism and injustice. It also happened to be a time when a series of serious crimes had gone unsolved and the police were coming under pressure from the press.
In February 1975, the bodies of two men were found in a rural area near Oklahoma City. A man called Leonard Patterson was arrested in connection with the murders, alongside his brother. After it emerged that the brothers had attended a party at the home of a woman called Dorothy Norris a few weeks earlier, the police rounded up everyone who had been at the party and put them in lineups. They were looking for witnesses who might have information on the Pattersons (Leonard Patterson later confessed to the murders), as well as suspects in other unsolved crimes.
Norris was Simmons’ aunt and he had been staying with her. He was arrested and placed in a lineup. As far as he is concerned, the police were on a fishing expedition, trying to attach names – any names – to crimes to boost their clearance rate. Soon enough, his name was attached to the murder of Rogers.
Told that he had been identified in the case, Simmons assumed it was a mistake that would quickly be rectified. After all, the police were there to uphold the law, not to abuse it. But then he was charged. Again, he assumed he would be cleared, because he hadn’t even been in Oklahoma at the time. Rogers had been killed on 30 December 1974; Simmons had flown from Louisiana to Oklahoma on 5 January 1975. Twelve witnesses testified that they had seen him on the day of the murder in Harvey, Louisiana; a number of them said they saw him playing pool in the evening, when the killing took place.
At the preliminary hearing, the prosecution brought forward 18-year-old Belinda Brown as an identification witness. A customer at the liquor store, she had been shot in the head during the incident. When interviewed after coming out of hospital, she told the late Det Sgt Anthony Garrett, one of two investigating officers, “my mind is all jumbled up” because of the brain injury she had suffered. This was not disclosed to the defence. At the trial, Brown identified Roberts as the shooter and Simmons as his accomplice.
A one-page document, separate from her other evidence, appeared to show that Brown had identified Simmons and Roberts during a lineup. “Those are the two guys I identified in the lineup and I identify them again now,” she told the court. But it later emerged that she had never identified them in the lineup. Lawyers for Simmons suggest that the one-page report was fabricated.
I’ve had mental health issues that haven’t been given a name yet. I went off the deep end a few times
The trial was done and dusted in fewer than three days: “That’s including picking the jury and the deliberation!” Right until the verdict, Simmons assumed he would walk free. “Even when the head of the jury said I was guilty, I thought he was talking about somebody else. I thought: ‘This guy’s in trouble, whoever he’s talking about,’ till he mentioned my name. Then it dawned on me that he was talking about me.”
What was the make-up of the jury? “All white. One black guy was on the panel and he was immediately dismissed,” says Simmons. The thing he remembers most strongly is the reaction of his mother, who died 12 years ago. “She screamed. A piercing scream. She knew I was innocent. That’s what I still haven’t got over today. That scream.” Was she a good mum? “The best. The best ever.”
Thirty days later, in June 1975, he returned to court for sentencing. “I was sentenced to die by electrocution on 7 October.” How did he feel? “I cried. I was pissed off, confused. I ain’t got over it yet and it was 50 years ago.” It is not surprising. That Simmons is sane is an incredible achievement. But, he says, it wasn’t always that way.
On death row, he was locked in his cell, alone, for 24 hours a day. He was allowed out three times a week, for 15 minutes, to shower. “I’m locked in the cell with the electric chair right here.” He points down an imaginary corridor. “I’ve had mental health issues that haven’t been given a name yet. I went off the deep end a few times and have been temporarily insane a few times. It’s like a rubber band – it expands and it returns. But if it snaps, you don’t come back. I never snapped.” There were many who did, he says. “Some guys never did come back. Some guys lost it and took flight.”
He believes his periods of mental illness may have saved his life. “For me, it’s like taking a vacation from reality.” You make it sound lovely, I say. He rocks with laughter. “That’s what I’m trying to explain. It was a relief not to be so acutely aware of what happens every moment of the day. So when you go into this temporary insanity, it’s just you and your imaginary friends. And that makes you good for a little while, but you have to come back. You can’t stay long.”
How did it change him? “It made me grow up. It matured me real quick.” When he left school, he was semi-literate. After he was convicted, he received many supportive letters, but he didn’t know how to respond adequately. Meanwhile, the man in the neighbouring cell had started to pass on his own letters, asking Simmons to read them for him. “One day I snapped and said: ‘Man, can’t you read?’ He started crying and said: ‘No, man, but don’t tell anybody.’ He was embarrassed. I said: ‘Well, I can’t read that good either; what we can do is teach each other.’ And we did teach each other how to read and write, and I started writing legal briefs and cell stories and poems. Now, I’ve got certificates in literacy.”
He realised he had to teach himself law if there was to be any hope of securing his freedom. “You need to find new appeals, because that’s the only way you’ll get out. So I learned to write. Writing is fighting. And I learned to read. Reading is fleeing. You read a book and you escape.” He pauses. “And there was a lot of praying and a lot of crying.” Another pause. “And I smoked a lot of weed. It calmed me down.”
Simmons came from a religious Christian family who stood by him. “Lot of guys thought I came from a rich family, but I didn’t,” he says. “I come from an average poor family, like everybody else. But when I needed some money, I’d call my sister Margo and tell her to pass the plate. That’s how we generated money. They were passing it among the family – everybody put $10 in there, so I got a lot. If they sent me $100, at least $10 to $15 was going to some of these guys who don’t get nothing.”
Did his faith stop him being bitter? No, he says, he was plenty bitter. For a long time, he was a difficult prisoner. He saw no point in behaving. “I got damn rebellious. I was innocent. I didn’t feel I had to comply.” Was his non-compliance verbal or violent? “All of it in the early days. All of it. Riots and all kinds of stuff.”
My innocence was my burden. That’s why I did 48 years in prison. You don’t see guilty guys do that kind of time
There were times on death row when he considered taking his life – not because he was desperate, he says, but as an act of resistance. “I thought of suicide in terms of defiance. It’s not: I can’t handle it no more. No, I never came to that. I was just: before you come to kill me, I’m gonna kill myself.”
After two years, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. “So they let me off death row and put me back in the general population. I guess I was supposed to be extremely grateful that I wasn’t facing the death penalty no more. I didn’t feel no gratitude.”
By 1985, his behaviour had improved and he was placed in a minimum-security jail. He escaped. “The fence was two feet high and I just walked away. I was gone for three weeks. I was trying to cross into Mexico and I got busted on the border. They tried to give me a two-year sentence running concurrent with my life sentence, but I’m like: ‘Nope, let’s go to trial.’ So I went to trial and argued the confinement was illegal so the escape was justified.” He giggles. “But guess what? I lost. They gave me a five-year sentence.”
During his final 30 years in jail, Simmons says he calmed down. He was focused on clearing his name and helping others. “There’s a saying that hurt people hurt people. Sometimes it’s the opposite. Hurt people heal people. You can recognise the hurt and you can heal it. And I had been hurt so bad I could see it and hear it and feel it in other people.”
In 1995, the trial prosecutor, Robert Midfelt, wrote to the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board saying that the case had “troubled” him for 20 years because the evidence was so “thin”. One year later, a private investigator working for Simmons discovered a missing police report showing that Brown had initially stated that the man she identified as Simmons was 6ft tall and weighed about 200lb (91kg). Simmons was 5ft 8in and of a smaller build. It emerged that Brown had identified a number of witnesses from eight lineups, none of whom were Simmons.
It also emerged that, in Simmons’ lineup, Brown had identified number six as the suspect. Simmons was number two. He says: “I think the police said: ‘OK, we want Simmons – we already got the other guy.’” The “other guy” was the brother of Leonard Patterson, who later admitted he had been with his brother at the time of the double murder, but was never convicted. Despite all this, parole was repeatedly denied.
He would have been released years ago if he had been prepared to take the rap. “I got this term I call the burden of innocence versus the luxury of guilt. It would have been a luxury for me if I’d been guilty. I did time with guys who pleaded guilty for murder, rape, kidnapping, all kinds of atrocious crimes, and they do a certain amount of years and go before the Parole Board and say: ‘I feel remorse for what I did,’ and they give them parole and let them go. Every year, I went before the Parole Board and they turned me down because I claimed innocence. My innocence was my burden. That’s why I did 48 years in prison. You don’t see guilty guys do that kind of time in prison.”
Perhaps the most shocking thing about Simmons’s story is that he needed no new evidence to prove his innocence; it had been there all the time. He told the Tulsa-based lawyer Joe Norwood the same thing he had been telling other lawyers for decades; the only difference is that Norwood listened to him. When Simmons discovered that Brown had not named him in the initial lineup, he knew he should be a free man, because of a ruling that states convictions cannot be secured purely on the basis of courtroom identifications.
What’s more, he says, “when she did the photofit, none of it fitted me. That was never disclosed to the jury. In fact, it was deliberately suppressed. So whatever she said in court can’t stand no more. This is what I’d been trying to tell the lawyers, but they weren’t listening to me. I don’t have a law degree, I don’t speak the language. I’m just a li’l old convict in the penitentiary, so they would never listen to me.”
He was initially released last year as an “exoneree”, meaning that his conviction had been quashed because it was unsafe. (Black people are about 7.5 times more likely to be wrongfully convicted of murder in the US than white people, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.) Being exonerated wasn’t good enough for Simmons, though. So he continued to fight. “I’m not an exoneree – I’m actually innocent. There’s a difference.” Three months ago, he was declared innocent. Now, Norwood is determined to clear the name of Roberts, who was released on parole in 2008.
I want to give the guys that are coming out a wraparound support system. They need help or they’re going back in
Just before his release, Simmons was diagnosed with stage four liver cancer. To add insult to injury, he was given no money to ease his rehabilitation into the community. People wrongfully convicted in Oklahoma are eligible for up to $175,000 in compensation. This would work out at a paltry $3,645 for every year Simmons was jailed. So far, though, he has received nothing. He relies on a GoFundMe campaign, which has raised nearly $350,000.
He is suing the police for compensation. Is it true that he is looking for $10m? No, he says. “I’m suing for hundreds of millions of dollars. The state hasn’t given me one dime. They haven’t even said they’re sorry. They haven’t said a word.”
Claude Shobert, a retired detective who worked under Garrett on the case and is named in Simmons’ lawsuit, told the Oklahoman newspaper that he remembers nothing about the murder, the lineups or the case. “After 49 years, it had to be something really special for me to remember, and since I don’t remember none of it, there’s nothing I can do about it,” he said.
Simmons is not interested in the money for money’s sake, he says – it would enable him to follow his dream. “It isn’t to buy me some big old luxurious ships or airplanes – I’m not into the material thing.” He hopes to use compensation to help people who have come out of prison to start a new life. “I want to give the guys that are coming out a wraparound support system. They need help or they’re going back in. That’s what I want to focus on.”
I ask how he is coping with the outside world. He grins the widest of grins. “Look at me! Look at me! You can tell. I’m so happy.” What is life like? “Life is beautiful, man. It’s so beautiful.” He tells me about the importance of his faith, his relationship with Glen, now 52, with whom he has been living, the exhilaration of driving for the first time in almost half a century.
I have talked to many people who have been wrongfully imprisoned and most are raging with anger, post-traumatic stress disorder or both. But Simmons is luminous with hope. He is even convinced he can beat cancer. “That’s receding, too. I came out of jail with stage four cancer. This thing’s down to stage two now.” He stops to take it all in. “Remarkable,” he says.
Elderly men sentenced to life in prison reflect on the reality of ‘hope’ and growing old behind bars
Published: January 14, 2026 5.18pm GMT
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- Marion VannierSenior Lecturer in Criminology, University of Manchester
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We were standing by a large white board in one of the prison’s educational areas, debriefing how our study on hope had gone when the man slipped into the room without a sound. Like the other participants he was over 60, and serving a life sentence. He had grey hair, and was very tall and slim.
He slowly picked up a chair before slamming it down. I invited him to join us, but he stayed still while the others watched. Then he dragged the chair across the floor with a piercing scrape. I could hear my own pulse.
As I began to speak I noticed he was crying. At first, it sounded like a whisper of sobs, but then it got louder. He rose abruptly, and came up close to me. I wrote in my fieldwork notes from that day:
My heart is racing. He asks, towering over me: ‘How dare you ask us about hope.’ The alarm blares. Guards escort him out. The others sit in stunned silence, eyes locked on us, waiting for a reaction.
In the months that followed, I would meet many other men for whom hope was not necessarily a lifeline as is so commonly assumed, but a burden that they had to carry, sometimes painfully.
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Hope is not a soft word in prison. It shapes how people cope with their sentence and it determines whether – and how – they engage with staff and other prisoners. It shapes whether they commit to vocational and educational activities, and it sustains connections with people on the outside.
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For older life-sentenced prisoners specifically, hope becomes interlinked with accelerated ageing, with bullying from younger prisoners, and with the fear of release into an unknown world.
Some people may think these men do not deserve hope. But the places that extinguish it do not produce safer prisons. Instead, they produce people who are damaged, isolated, and less capable of reintegrating into society.
The hope project
My project (In search of Hope: the case of elderly life-sentenced prisoners) began in August 2022. We were investigating how the “right to hope” – as defined by Judge Ann Power-Forde in her concurring opinion to the European Court of Human Rights judgment Vinter and others v the UK (2013)– translates behind prison walls for older people serving life sentences, many of whom face slim prospects of release due to their advanced age and the length of their prison sentence.
The research was carried out across three English prisons over 12 months by myself and research associate, Helen Gair, with a small team of research assistants. We conducted fieldwork in a Category A prison (reserved for people presenting the highest levels of risk), a Category C (mid-security level prison, often aimed at training and resettlement), and a Category D (open prison or the last stage before release).
Each facility had its own smell and sound. The spatial layout and daily rhythm varied too. For instance, the high security site was an old red brick Victorian building, and the wings were arranged in a half panopticon (circular) design. Outside the main block, guard dogs were walked on a strip of green that ran along a ten-metre-high wall. Inside it was loud; lockdowns were frequent, and it smelled of sweat and mould.
In the open prison, the smell of cannabis drifted through the grounds. Men greeted us in grey tracksuits, often carrying disposable cups of tea. There were ducks and a pond and a RAF plane on display.
In the Category C prison, we often got lost. The alphabetical alignment of buildings made little sense to us. We had our own set of keys which meant we could move around independently. However, rusty locks slowed us down often, and every gate and door had to be opened and closed behind us.
Men aged 50 and above and serving life sentences were invited to participate. We collected diaries, completed ethnographic prison observations, and ran one-to-one interviews with each participant.
Additionally, interviews were conducted with prison staff, both working in frontline and office-based roles, to get a sense of how those who work closest to ageing life-sentenced prisoners perceived hope and whether prison practices preserved or restrained it. Overall, we wanted to find out how hope was experienced by prisoners and how it was handled as a prison practice.
Idealised hope v prison reality
In the 2010s, a case was brought before the European Court of Human Rights by Jeremy Bamber, Douglas Vinter and Peter Moor. They had each been convicted of murder in the UK and been given whole-life orders – the most severe form of life sentence.
This means that by law, they were sentenced to spend the rest of their lives in prison with no minimum term set for parole or release. Only a small percentage of people get such severe sentences: Myra Hindley and the Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe being two examples.
On July 9, 2013, the human rights court ruled that whole-life orders which do not include any prospect of release or review would amount to inhuman or degrading treatment, contrary to Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The notion of a “right to hope” was first mentioned by Judge Ann Power-Forde’s concurring judgment:
… Even those who commit the most abhorrent and egregious of acts … nevertheless retain their essential humanity and carry within themselves the capacity to change. Long and deserved though their prison sentences may be, they retain the right to hope that, someday, they may have atoned for the wrongs which they have committed. They ought not to be deprived entirely of such hope. To deny them the experience of hope would be to deny a fundamental aspect of their humanity and to do that would be degrading.
The right to hope is thus vested in a possibility of release and review. What this means is that there must be a realistic possibility that any prisoner sentenced to life imprisonment be considered, at some point in time, for release or that the justification for their continued detention needs to be reviewed.
But how does the right to hope account for the fact of ageing in prison?
The rapid and global “greying” of the prison population indeed complicates the human rights jurisprudencial understanding of a right to hope. As of March 2025, there were 87,919 people in prison in England and Wales, with nearly one in five (18%) aged 50 or older, according to the Ministry of Justice.
Compounding matters, life-sentenced prisoners now make up around 10% of the sentenced population, and this group is ageing rapidly. Almost a third of “lifers” are over 50. As a result, old, life-sentenced prisoners are the fastest-growing subgroup in the system.
This phenomenon combined with the current overcrowding crisis produces a range of managerial and ethical challenges: bed spaces are tied up for decades, healthcare and social care demands are on a steep rise, and the pressures on ill-equipped prison staff increase.
The myth of prison release
One important finding from our project is that parole and the possibility of release during a prisoner’s life span becomes somewhat of a myth for those serving life sentences at an advanced age. Usually, life-sentenced prisoners are given a minimum tariff, which is a period when they are not eligible for parole. This legal principle does not account for age however. Dean, 62 , was a life-sentenced prisoner at the Category A prison who had served six years. He told us how unrealistic parole felt in light of his age:
I will be 80 years old before my first parole hearing and in all honesty I don’t know if I will reach that milestone. Although my health is reasonable, I’m on all kinds of medication to keep me going but incarceration has a way of dragging you down so I am not optimistic.
Trevor was 73 when we interviewed him in the Category C prison and had been inside for 27 years. He was sat in a wheelchair and had an elastic band wrapped around his middle finger and thumb. He explained to us that it helped him hold a pen.
He described years of postponed parole hearings, medical delays, and transfers to lower security prisons being denied because his health needs could not be met in open prison conditions. He asked us simply:
If you were in my situation would you live in hope or would you resign yourself to your future?
The experience of no longer believing in release is supported by official data that shows that few prisoners sentenced to life get released during their lifetime.
One in five lifers are now beyond their tariff, often by several years with age-related barriers to parole contributing to prolonged incarceration. What we noticed during fieldwork was that older prisoners often struggled to access or complete accredited programmes because of mobility issues and cognitive impairment, but also due to managerial prioritisation of younger prisoners or those convicted of shorter sentences.
Rising deaths in England and Wales among older prisoners further underscores the illusory prospect of release.
Nearly nine in ten of the 192 deaths from natural causes in the year 2025 involved older prisoners and the number of people in prison requiring palliative care continues to grow.
From 2016 to 2020, hospitals recorded 190 admissions of older male prisoners with a palliative care diagnosis. In roughly 40% of those cases, cancer was the main condition on entry. The charity, Inquest, reported in 2020 that many of the deaths in prison were neither inevitable nor unforeseeable, pointing instead to systemic failings in healthcare provision, communication, emergency intervention, and medication management.
Building on this, academic scholars Philippa Tomczak and Ròisìn Mulgrew argued that classifying deaths in custody as “natural” obscure the ways in which prison environments contribute to deaths that might otherwise have been avoided.
Additionally, research has repeatedly linked self-harm and suicide patterns to experiences of hopelessness and social isolation. The participants in our study similarly tied the removal of hope to suicides, citing examples they had witnessed in prison.
In his prison diary, a participant with thick rectangular glasses called Ian, 65, who had served 33 years of his life sentence and was now held in a Category C prison, wrote:
With the absent (sic) of hope you have despair. I have known prisoners who have committed suicide, they had no hope or expectations only misery and despair.
So there appears to be a contradiction between the legal possibility of release and its practical improbability in the context of old and ageing, life-sentenced prisoners.
The fear of release
Beyond the practical improbability of release, many participants described how much they feared the world they would hypothetically re-enter one day. Several participants in their 60s and 70s reflected on how they no longer recognised the world outside.
For them, the time spent in prison combined with their physical and cognitive decline has institutionalised them. They felt they could not fare alone outside prison rules and environments. One man named Roy, who had spent decades in various Category A prisons wrote in his diary:
I have no hope of, or real wish to leave prison, where I am now completely institutionalised, I have no responsibilities other than abiding by prison rules, and few expenses.
Another frail-looking man named Russell, 68, described in his diary (which he completed from his Category C cell) how the very idea of a future had become hollow: “It’s difficult really because like I say, I haven’t got any hope of getting out of prison as far as I’m concerned. That is it. I’m in prison and that’s as far as it will go.”
Practical matters such as technological advances and housing also made the very thought of release overwhelming. Gary, 63, who had served 24 years, wrote poignantly about his fears of release, saying: “Release frightens me because of the label that has been firmly given to me and that brings its own problems. Where will I live? How will I live?”
A 73-year-old participant named Kevin, who was transferred during the project from a Category C to an open prison, spoke about how, after 21 years in prison, things will have changed too much on the outside for him to deal with. As he stood on the doorstep of freedom, he worried about getting his head around new technology and accessing simple things like his pension. He said: “Technology has moved on at a phenomenal pace, seems very scary to me … I should stay here in prison where everything is regulated and structured rather than going out to something that is quite alien to me.”
These feelings are exacerbated by the erosion of social networks, the death of family and friends, and the disappearance of any meaningful horizon. Social isolation means that the world they would be reintegrating into has become alien and they will have to navigate it mostly alone. Kevin added:
People that I used to call friends no longer want to know me or have died. One thing for sure that I can [say] is true, you certainly find out who your true friends are … when you come to prison and especially if you come to prison for a long time.
This sense of destroyed horizons, where release holds no promise and the outside world has become even more terrifying than the cell, has been dramatised in popular culture.
In The Shawshank Redemption (1994) the character Brooks, released after 50 years inside, finds himself unable to cope with the pace and impersonality of the modern world. His suicide becomes a haunting metaphor for the crushing effect of institutionalisation that hollows out the self and the possibility of meaningful social reintegration.
When hoping becomes harmful
Other prisoners we spoke to seemingly decided it was more beneficial for them to give up on hope altogether. Some – like Barry -– wondered if giving up on hope of release would be less torturous.
Barry was 65 when we spoke to him and has spent over four decades in prison on a life sentence. He’s tall and slim. When he walked in, we noticed he had a limp and used a cane. The first time we met, he sat with his hands clasped, speaking in a measured voice that occasionally broke into a laugh, not from humour but more from what I felt like was exhaustion. Though parole is technically available to him, he has come to see the pursuit of release not as hopeful but as harmful.
Over years of disappointments, Barry wondered if living with no hope would be less painful and felt it had become “pointless” to hope. He wrote in his diary:
Hope is when I want something to happen or something to be true … I often ask myself would it be kinder to live with no hope and just live with a ‘wait and see’ kind of attitude.
Indeed, every parole hearing postponed, every dashed expectation had eroded the value of hoping. Ultimately, giving up on hope is captured as something that eventually preserves mental health. As Barry added:
An empty case of hope is healthy, I say that because of the amount of men I have seen become ill; disappointment becomes despair, becomes depression, becomes mental ill health … then when you stop hoping, you start to recover and you no longer feel hopeless, as you are not hoping for anything. So hope is a paradox, it can disappoint or make you feel there is a real possibility of things to come.
He recalled reading about an American woman sentenced to life without parole who had begged for the death penalty instead. Her explanation (“I don’t just want to be alive, I want to be able to live”) resonated with him so powerfully that he said it, “almost knocked me off my chair”. He recognised in her plea the same cruel paradox he faced: that to prolong his existence in hopeless conditions was no life at all. His conclusion was irrevocable:
I understand more than most the need for hope, but all the years that I have been in prison and all the hopes I have had destroyed, I see hope as an enemy.
But then Barry equally admitted that he still hoped, no matter what. His hope was like a human natural reflex, over which he had no control, it just happened. He said: “We all hope … I hope I’ll get out on my next parole.”
What then, is hope in prison? Is it cruel and torturous or is it a human feature that brings relief and drive?
Recalibrating hope
We found hope meant different things to different people. It is not just about release. Some needed detailed plans, others focused on the day to day. Sometimes hope shifted towards modest goals that are tied to imagined places outside prison: a quiet retirement, a chance to study, to garden.
Terry was 65 and had served 38 years in category A prison. He told us that all he hoped for was “a quiet life in retirement”, while Russell, who was about the same age but had served over 12 years and was in a Category C when he wrote his diary, said that he hoped to, “… someday be released and to live the remaining years I have left in a small bungalow with a small garden in a village miles away from my old area of England. Have a pet cat.”
Others cast their hopes in more detailed and concrete plans about what the future would look like. Carl, 60, who enjoyed cooking and working out, for example, said he hoped to move in with his daughter and grandchildren for a while in an area where his ambition is to build his own house. He added: “I designed and roughly costed the development plan that helped to reinforce the hope that these plans were achievable.”
In the moment
But other participants recalibrated hope to more immediate aspirations set in the present, and in day-to-day encounters.
Barry said: “My hope is that I continue to live in the moment … You know, cause right now I’m in this office with you two guys, it’s calm. It’s nice. It’s peaceful. It’s a nice moment. But I’m not gonna think about what it’s gonna be like at 4pm because I might walk out that door and straight into a prison riot.”
Russell agreed, adding: “Looking for the future, I just go from one day to the next. It’s no good planning too far ahead.”
This shift of hope raises questions about how prisons shape and even limit the ways people can access and imagine their futures.
Another participant, Craig, who was 66 and had only served just over five years in the Category A prison when we met him wrote: “… you personalise hope to suit the circumstances.”
For the institution and those working in prison, these attitudes towards hope could be perceived as successful because prisoners sentenced to the longest sentences demonstrated a commitment to live a crime-free life, set in the present moment, focused on small menial things that will not raise any risk for management.
But when hope becomes so short-termist and bland, we are able to capture a shift in the very logic of imprisonment – one which is less about nourishing transformation aimed at resocialisation, and more about the life-long containment of decaying and dying bodies.
Hope matters
This article opened with a man telling my colleagues and I: “How dare you ask us about hope?” That moment has echoed throughout this study, both as an outburst that shows how prison research can be fraught with complexity but can also propel further and deeper reflection on humanitarian ideals such as hope.
When people in prison speak of the cruelty and fallacy of hope, you begin to wonder how much beauty and promise hope really holds in spaces of high control and constraint.
When transposed to prisons, hope no longer seems to be attached to an open horizon, evocative of lightness and liberty found anew. Instead, it represents dissociation from the outside world, and the cause of frustration, mistrust and a sense of abandonment.
Hope in prison exposes a disconnect between abstract legal humanitarian ideals and the empirical realities of ageing while incarcerated for long periods of time. And this claim could probably be extended to other settings of heightened regulation and tight monitoring, such as care homes, immigration detention centres, or even youth justice facilities.
The decision to depart from hope’s conventional, perhaps slightly romanticised meaning, and to recalibrate it towards real, daily conditions could nonetheless illustrate new ways for how older life-sentenced prisoners (and others under constraint) regain agency and keep going.
Ultimately, hope matters – not only for the people I met and interviewed – but also for broader society.
Imprisonment marked by hopelessness is linked to deteriorating mental and physical health, increasing pressure on prison healthcare and, upon release, on community health and social care services.
This is exacerbated for older prisoners released after decades inside. Hope is not a sentimental indulgence, but a condition that shapes whether imprisonment prepares people to live safely beyond prison or releases them with profound unmet needs. Regimes that erode hope risk merely displacing, rather than resolving, social harm.
For you: more from our Insights series:
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- We found over 300 million young people had experienced online sexual abuse and exploitation over the course of our meta-study
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