The Offender’s Experience of Punitiveness: A Descriptive Phenomenological Study

• In Event: Poster Session

Abstract

The way offenders experience a certain punishment, the (un)intentional harms caused by it and the consequences and effects of this punishment were already subjects of extensive criminological research. With the presented explorative study, we want to discover the lived experience of ‘being punished’. We want to clarify the punishment experience as a whole by asking offenders what ‘being punished’ means to them, how they perceive the punitive nature of their sanction and how they integrate this experience within their life course. The study will focus on several types of punishment, including the prison sentence and the community service (to be determined in function of the currently changing Belgian penal legislation). For this purpose, the “descriptive phenomenological method in psychology”, as described by Dr. Amedeo Giorgi, will be used. This research method aims at describing the lived experience of a certain phenomenon. First phenomenological interviews will be conducted with several offenders who were sentenced to the types of punishments we include in the research. Subsequently, the interviews will be analysed using the predefined analytical method of Giorgi, which will result in the creation of themes and the expression of the structure of the phenomenon.

Author

• Elli Gilbert, Leuven Institute of Criminology, Belgium