Crit Crim (2011) 19:175–196 DOI 10.1007/s10612-010-9111-y

Structuration Theory and Wrongful Imprisonment: From ‘Victimhood’ to ‘Survivorship’? Gabe Tan

Published online: 14 September 2010  Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

Abstract Building on existing research from a zemiological approach, this article seeks to contribute to a more ontological understanding of the production and reproduction of harms associated with wrongful imprisonment in England and Wales. Drawing from Anthony Giddens’s theory of structuration, it is argued that whilst the harms of wrongful imprisonment are both complex and devastating, victims need not be perceived as entirely passive. Rather, victims of wrongful imprisonment can be viewed as knowledgeable agents with the intrinsic capacity and agency to strategically cope with and even survive the harms that they experience. The article concludes with personal accounts by victims of wrongful imprisonment that form an identifiable ‘survivor’ discourse to highlight some of the key critical factors that are vital in helping victims of wrongful imprisonment to re-structure their lives after release.

Introduction Existing analyses on wrongful convictions in the England and Wales have tended to focus on the causes of the problem and how they might be prevented (see for examples, Walker and Starmer 1999; McConville and Bridges 1994; Green 1997, 4–22; Naughton 2007, 53–79). This has been at the expense of analysis of the harms experienced by those who have been wrongfully convicted and imprisoned and the survival strategies that they employ after their release from imprisonment. Another distinguishing feature of existing analyses on wrongful convictions is that they have also struggled with how they might be defined. As Naughton (2006) noted, a successful appeal against a conviction ‘bears no relation to whether a successful appellant is factually guilty or factually innocent’ (my emphasis) (see also Naughton 2007, 14–26). More specifically, positive proof of factual innocence (such as conviction of the real perpetrator which completely exonerates an appellant) is not a requirement for a successful G. Tan (&) Innocence Network UK (INUK), School of Law, University of Bristol, Wills Memorial Building, Queens Road, Bristol BS8 1RJ, UK e-mail: [email protected]

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appeal against conviction. Under the s. 2(1) of the Criminal Appeal Act 1995, for instance, convictions given in the Crown Court are quashed by the Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) (CACD) if they are deemed to be ‘unsafe’. This can result from some serious procedural breach(es) in the trial or pre-trial process1 or the discovery of fresh evidence which, in the eyes of the CACD, calls into question the safety of the original conviction.2 A finding that a guilty verdict is unsafe in law and cannot be upheld by the CACD is therefore not a declaration that the successful appellant is factually innocent (see Roberts 2003, 441–451; Nobles and Schiff 1995, 299–320, 2006, 80–91).3 Against this background, this article, seeks to contribute to existing studies on the harms engendered by wrongful imprisonment and the attempts by victims to survive them postrelease. Despite the legal test of the safety of convictions, it adopts a lay perspective to define a victim of wrongful imprisonment as someone who is most likely to be factually innocent of the crime that s/he had been convicted of, meaning that s/he had no involvement with the crime at all (Naughton 2009a, Chap. 1), or that no crime ever occurred (see Naughton 2003a). From this standpoint, it draws from personal accounts by victims of wrongful imprisonment derived from biographical and autobiographical accounts and press and media interviews. All of the victims quoted maintained factual innocence at trial and throughout their imprisonment and had their convictions quashed on appeal following a referral by the Home Secretary4 or the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC)5 to the CACD having failed to overturn their convictions in the normal appeal process. The exception is the case of the Cardiff Three who overturned their convictions on their first appeal and were subsequently proven to be factually innocent. In all of the cases cited, the convictions were quashed as the evidence that led to the conviction, whether by way of confessions, expert or forensic evidence or witness testimonies 1

The leading authority for this interpretation of ‘unsafe’ is the case R v Mullen (1999). Nicholas Mullen appealed against his conviction for conspiracy to cause explosion on the basis that his deportation from Zimbabwe to England was unlawful. In quashing Nicholas Mullen’s conviction, the CACD held that the definition of ‘unsafe’ under s. 2 of the Criminal Appeal Act 1995 was wide enough to include an abuse of process at the pre-trial stage.

2 The CACD has powers under s. 23 of the Criminal Appeal Act 1968 to receive fresh evidence not adduced at the original trial. The role of the CACD is not to ascertain whether the fresh evidence proves the appellant innocent. Rather, as stated by Lord Justice Judge in the case of R v Hakala (2002), ‘the essential question, and ultimately the only question for this court, is whether, in light of this fresh evidence, the convictions are unsafe’ (Lord Justice Judge, R v Hakala, Para. 11). 3

The complexities of defining ‘innocence’ and ‘wrongful conviction’ have similarly been debated in the United States. Huff et al. (1986, 519), for instance, argued that whilst a wrongful conviction can be said to have occurred if the evidence that led to the conviction does not demonstrate guilt beyond reasonable doubt, such an individual cannot be categorised as a ‘convicted innocent’ unless guiltlessness is established. Radelet et al. (1996, 910–911) make the distinction between ‘legal’ and ‘factual’ innocence, the former refers to the failure of the state to meet the legal burden of establishing guilt beyond reasonable doubt, and the latter referring to cases where the defendant was not involved in the crime at all. More recently, Burnett (2002, 971–982) identified three types of ‘innocence’: ‘actual’ innocence referring to cases where the convicted person was not at all involved (2002, 975); ‘factual’ innocence denoting situations where the convicted person was in some way involved but was not the killer (2002, 977) and ‘legal’ innocence involving cases where the defendant admits responsibility for the crime but offers and excuse or justification (2002, 979–980).

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Prior to the establishment of the Criminal Cases Review Commission, the Home Secretary had the power under s.17 of the Criminal Appeal Act 1968 to refer alleged miscarriages of justice that have exhausted the normal appeals process back to the CACD.

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The CCRC is the official body established in 1997 to review alleged miscarriages of justice in England, Wales and Northern Ireland and refer qualifying cases back to the appeal courts (Criminal Cases Review Commission 2010a).

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were proven to be fabricated, unreliable or erroneous, that is, the evidence that indicated their guilt was proven to be false. In four parts, this article, first, outlines the existing research on the effects of wrongful imprisonment on victims in England and Wales and other jurisdictions. Second, it builds, critically, upon research from a zemiologically inspired approach to present a deeper ontological analysis of the complex processes entailed in the production and continuity of harms experienced by victims of wrongful imprisonment after release. Then, Anthony Giddens’s theory of structuration, in particular his notion of the duality of structure and agency, is applied to present an analysis that emphasises both the structural forces that shape the lived realities of victims of wrongful imprisonment post-release as well as the inherent agency that they possess to devise and put into action what might be termed ‘survival strategies’. Finally, developing this theoretical argument, some of the key factors that are vital in facilitating victims of wrongful imprisonment to exercise their agency in their attempts to rebuild their lives after release are identified. Overall, the analysis constructed here is not intended to be a systematic or definitive evaluation of the harms experienced by victims of wrongful imprisonment or how they might be survived. Rather, the aim is to apply theoretical tools to the victim and survivor discourses apparent in the accounts of victims of wrongful imprisonment who overturn their convictions outside of the normal appeal processes that might provide indicators for how victims may free themselves from their victimhood.

An Overview of the Effects of Wrongful Imprisonment In the last decade, almost 300 post-appeal cases have been overturned following a referral to the appeal courts by the CCRC (Criminal Cases Review Commission 2010b). These cases reveal a myriad of causes of wrongful convictions such as false confessions, as in cases such as Robert Brown (Hopkins 2002), Paul Blackburn (Walker 2009; Legal TV 2009), Sean Hodgson (O’Neill 2009) and Ian Lawless (Fresco 2009); flawed expert evidence as evidenced in cases like Sally Clark (Batt 2004), Barry George (Doward 2008) and Kevin Callan (Callan 1998); false allegations in cases such as Warren Blackwell (Greenhill 2006), Anver Daud Sheikh (BBC News 2006a), Basil Williams-Rigby and Michael Lawson (Woffinden 2003); and the instrumental role of the police in contributing to many of these high profile wrongful convictions.6 The experience of imprisonment by victims of wrongful conviction is unique and, arguably, much more challenging than the experiences of prisoners who are guilty and serving sentences for crimes that they did commit. Recent research by Naughton (2005, 1–11, 2009b, 357–372) demonstrated the obstacles to progression and parole that many prisoners are confronted with as a result of maintaining their innocence. Frequently labeled as ‘deniers’, they are continually pressured by prison authorities and the Parole Board to admit guilt to crimes they claim they have not committed. They also frequently serve sentences way past their given tariffs as a result of their refusal to undertake offending behaviour programmes that require admission of guilt as a pre-requisite (see also Hill 2001).

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In all of the cases of wrongful conviction cited above, the police played an instrumental role in causing them either through coercing and torturing suspects into making false confessions, withholding or fabricating evidence, or, flawed investigative practices.

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Rather than just ‘getting on’ with their sentences, victims of wrongful conviction testify that they spent their incarceration defying prison authorities and persistently fighting their cases in the hope that their convictions might one day be overturned. Johnny Kamara, for instance, spent 16 out of his 20 years in prison in solitary confinement, during which he wrote over 300,000 letters to MPs and campaigners appealing for assistance (see Shorter 2010). His conviction for the murder of bookmaker John Suffield was eventually overturned in 2000 when it was found that over 200 witness statements that could prove his innocence were withheld from his defence team by the police (BBC News 2000). Similarly, during his 16 years of wrongful imprisonment, Michael Shirley embarked on a relentless campaign to overturn his conviction which involved a 35-hour roof-top protest at Long Lartin Prison (Olden 2003) and a 42-day hunger strike which almost cost him his life (Shaw 2003). He was eventually released from prison after new DNA evidence led to the quashing of his conviction in July 2003 for the murder and rape of 24 year-old Linda Cook (Johnson and Williams 2004, 77–82). Perhaps surprisingly, however, only three researches have been conducted on the distinct experiences of wrongful imprisonment and its effects on those who have been released following a successful appeal. As wrongful imprisonment relates to victims convicted in England and Wales, Grounds’s (2004, 165–182, 2005, 1–58) clinical assessment of 18 wrongfully imprisoned victims revealed a series of disabling psychological and mental illnesses caused by years of institutionalisation. These included posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), ‘enduring personality change’, and other psychiatric disorders such as depressive and panic disorders, symptoms of paranoia, social withdrawal and alcohol or drug dependence (see also Jamieson and Grounds 2005, 33–65; Grounds and Jamieson 2003, 347–362). Studies on victims of wrongful imprisonment in other jurisdictions have provided a more sociological understanding of the range of obstacles they are confronted with after release. Campbell and Denov’s (2004, 139–163) study of five victims of wrongful imprisonment in Canada detailed the ‘coping strategies’, such as violence and cooperation; withdrawal and isolation; and preoccupation with exoneration that victims adopt to cope with their incarceration. In addition, they identified a range of long-term effects that victims of wrongful imprisonment continue to experience after release, particularly the loss of self-identity, loss of family and the effects that the wrongful imprisonment have on families of victims. They also noted a common anger towards the justice system in all five respondents, which is accompanied by a profound mistrust of authority figures and a continued sense of imprisonment despite their release from prison (see also Denov and Campbell 2005, 224–249). Finally, research on victims of wrongful imprisonment in the United States undertaken by Westervelt and Cook (2007, 21–38) adopted what they described as a ‘feminist methodology’ in a series of semi-structured interviews with 16 death row exonerees over a 3-year period. In addition to revealing the trauma and fear of being executed for crimes they had not committed, their qualitative research highlighted the mountain of practical and emotional obstacles that death row exonerees are confronted with after release ranging from difficulties with reintegration, finding housing and gaining employment, loss of selfidentity and familial relationships, continuing public stigma and victimization by the state (Westervelt and Cook 2008, 32–37, 2010, 259–275). Despite the jurisdictional difference, the harms and obstacles to reintegration that victims of wrongful imprisonment say that they experience appear to be similar. A key question, however, is whether these harms are unique to innocent victims of wrongful conviction or whether they are consequential of long-term imprisonment similarly experienced

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by prisoners who are guilty. This question cannot be definitively answered in the absence of comparative studies between the post-release experiences of the wrongly convicted and guilty offenders who have been released because they have served their sentences or achieved parole. On the face of it, though, there might be some similarities. As Grounds noted: …the losses of life opportunities, the effects of separation from families, and the dislocation of time and social context that the men faced after release were consequences of imprisonment that may be faced by other long-term prisoners, too. (2005: 3) However, the difficulties of reintegration are, arguably, exacerbated for those who have overturned their convictions due to the lack of support to assist them in coping with life after prison. Various government initiatives, such as social services and probation, and charitable organisations exist to assist guilty offenders in gaining employment when released, no doubt as a means to prevent them from re-offending (see for example, Gaines 2008; National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders (NACRO) 2010; UNLOCK 2010; Foundation Training Company (FTC) 2010; Tomorrow’s People 2010; HM Prison Service 2010). But, the recently established Miscarriages of Justice Support Service (MJS) (see Royal Courts of Justice (RCJ) Advice Bureau 2010), a specialist scheme under the umbrella of the Citizen’s Advice Bureau, provides only a limited service to victims who qualify, namely, post-appeal successful appellants. Research indicates that not many prisoners take up the offer and the MJS faces structural and resource constraints that significantly limit its capacity to provide the forms of post-release assistance that victims of wrongful imprisonment need (see Tan 2009). More importantly, perhaps, innocent victims of wrongful imprisonment will likely be faced with an increased psychological burden stemming from the moral wrongfulness of their ordeal and the fact that the damage and losses they sustained would not have occurred not for the errors or deliberate misconduct of state officials such as the police that caused their wrongful imprisonment (cf. Westervelt and Cook 2010, 265). Indeed, the fight for justice for the wrongfully convicted often does not end with their release from prison. Rather, as will be further explored below, victims often spend years after their release trying to have their factual innocence fully established, seeking compensation and accountability from the state for causing their wrongful convictions. Applying Kauzlarich et al.’s (2001, 173–194) notion of ‘state crime victims’, Westervelt and Cook (2010, 259) recently argued that the harms sustained by death row exonerees and exacerbated by the lack of aftercare provision from the state are ‘stateproduced harms’ (2010, 271), and victims of wrongful conviction ought to be seen as victims of state crime: Exonerees are victims of the state. They have been wrongly convicted and incarcerated for crimes they did not commit as a result of explicit illegal state action or the misapplication of state power. Whether the result of wilful, illegal conduct by state officials, implicit public pressure on and tunnel vision by police, an imbalance of resources in favor of the state, or sheer carelessness by investigators and prosecutors, wrongful convictions cause harm and produce victims. Exonerees’ victimization continues after exoneration when the state fails to assist their reintegration efforts and recognize its responsibility in their wrongful convictions. The victimology perspective offered by Kauzlarich et al.…provides a framework for understanding

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victims of wrongful convictions as victims of state-produced harms (Westervelt and Cook 2010: 261). Whilst this theoretical approach is useful in demonstrating the role of the state in contributing and increasing the harmful consequences of wrongful conviction, a fundamental problem remains that the conduct of state officials responsible for the wrongful conviction would not be legally considered a state crime unless legislations are put in place to render their specific conduct unlawful. Further, unless and until a successful conviction against the state official or agent who had allegedly caused a wrongful conviction is achieved, no crime can, officially, be said to have been committed. In England and Wales, for instance, breaches of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (1984) (PACE), which governs police investigations, are not criminal offences. It is precisely this kind of limitation with the concept of crime that led to the development of zemiology or the study of social harm to which I will now turn, offering a critical review of attempts by Naughton (2001, 2003b, 2007) to apply zemiology to the problem of wrongful convictions in England and Wales.

Zemiology As a recent development within the broad area of radical or critical criminology, zemiology derives from the long-standing critique that ‘crime’ as defined by the state, ‘consists of many petty events’ whilst excluding and actively deflecting attention from more serious and pressing social harms ‘caused by chronic conditions or states of affairs’ (Hillyard and Tombs 2004, 21). These harms include avoidable deaths and injuries in the workplace; environmental pollution; state violence; and long-standing failures of government to alleviate poverty, unemployment, poor living conditions often widespread amongst the poor, disadvantaged and powerless (Hillyard et al. 2004; Hillyard and Tombs 2005). In response, zemiology seeks to step outside the discourse of ‘crime’ altogether, shifting instead, towards a theory of harm that embraces holistically, ‘the range of serious harms that are engendered by social and political decisions and/or structures in the interests of social justice’ (Gordon et al. 1999). In the specific field of miscarriage of justice, Naughton (2007, 161–191; 2003b, 5–17) initiated a zemiologically grounded methodology to assess, critically, the harmful consequences that miscarriage of justice engender. Challenging dominant conceptions of miscarriages of justice as an ‘exceptional’ phenomenon that involve only a handful of cases that are overturned by the CACD following a referral by the CCRC each year, he argued for the inclusion of ‘routine’ and ‘mundane’ miscarriages of justice which equate to approximately 5,000 or so successful appeals through the normal routine process against convictions obtained at the Crown Court and in magistrates’ courts each year. Further, developing the four lines of harms originally marked out by Hillyard and Tombs (2004, 19–20), Naughton (2007, 165–178) charted the types of harm that result from miscarriages of justice, including psychological, physical, financial and social harms.7 7

These four categories of harm developed by Naughton vary slightly from what was originally proposed by Hillyard and Tombs. In defining zemiology as a study of social harm, they suggested four categories of social harm including physical, psychological and financial harms as well as ‘cultural safety’ which encompasses ‘notions of autonomy, development and growth, and access to cultural, intellectual and informational resources generally available in any given society’ (Hillyard and Tombs 2004, 19–20). Indeed, it can be argued that Naughton’s classification of ‘social harm’ as a sub-category of the typology of

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In addition to the psychological harms suffered by victims of wrongful imprisonment detailed in Grounds’s (2004, 2005) research, Naughton illustrated the physical harms caused by miscarriages of justice with reference to cases such as Keith Twitchell, George Lewis and Patrick Molloy of the Bridgewater Four case, all of whom were seriously abused and tortured by the police who coerced them into making false confessions for crimes they did not commit.8 In addition, there is also the social stigma and losses sustained by victims themselves as well as their families and loved ones which he categorised as ‘social’ harm (Naughton 2007, 166–178). Taking a ‘macro’ view of the financial harms consequent of miscarriages of justice, he highlighted the extensive financial harm to the public when the cost of imprisoning the innocent, legal aid incurred in overturning wrongful convictions, compensation to qualifying miscarriage of justice victims, costs to the benefits system in having to pay for families whose breadwinners have been wrongfully imprisoned, and so on, are taken into account (Naughton 2007, 173–178, 2001). In this way, Naughton’s application of the zemiological approach provides an holistic analysis of the effects of wrongful convictions by including a whole range of harms that are experienced not only by individual victims, but their families and society as a whole, too. However, it has to be acknowledged that as a budding approach which emerged within the area of (critical) criminology within the last 5 years, there remains several conceptual challenges that have accompanied zemiology since its, albeit, very recent conceptualisation. These objections mainly relate to the difficulties of defining and measuring the inherently subjective notion of harm. As Hillyard and Tombs (2004, 20) acknowledged: There are obvious objections to be raised at such attempts to even begin to define harms. At best, it could be objected that harm is no more definable than crime, and that it too lacks any ontological reality; at worst, it might be objected that definitions of harm descend into a pure relativism, the production of particular political orientations to the world. In response to such objections, Hillyard and Tombs (2004, 20–21) argued that in contrast to what the existing body of criminal law can offer, ‘defining what constitutes harm is a productive and positive process’. Further, although harm is difficult to define and quantify, there are indicators and ‘proxy measures’ which can be utilised to make the zemiological exercise possible. As such, whilst the difficulties in identifying and measuring harms need to be accepted, these can be viewed as ‘technical issues in, rather than as insuperable obstacles to’ the development the zemiological enterprise (original emphasis). These conceptual difficulties that zemiology faces can be addressed to some degree by going beyond identifying what are the harms and their sources and who are the victims of harm, towards focusing on the hows of harm, by this I mean the ontological experiences and processes of harm of those who sustain it. More specifically, by extending the boundaries of zemiology towards an empirical study of the processes involved in the production and manifestation of harm, not only can the ‘ontological reality’ of Footnote 7 continued harms engendered by miscarriage of justice is slightly problematic: at its core, miscarriages of justice and whatever forms of harms they produced are intrinsically social, in that they are resultant, whether directly or indirectly, of the wider, socio-legal operations of the criminal justice system which caused the miscarriage of justice in the first place. 8

In many ways, Naughton’s example of physical harm can be more appropriately viewed as a cause rather than consequence of the miscarriage of justice in that it is precisely the deliberate infliction of torture and abuse by the police in their attempts to coerce false confessions from these miscarriage of justice victims that directly led to their wrongful conviction and imprisonment.

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harm/zemiology be restored and the study of harm made more ‘real’, in the context of wrongful imprisonment victims, it has the potential to offer a more sophisticated understanding of the complex ways in which victims of wrongful imprisonment experience harm. In terms of the production of harm, the ultimate cause or source of all forms of harm experienced by innocent victims of wrongful imprisonment is, no doubt, the wrongful conviction itself. After all, none of these harms would have been inflicted upon them had their conviction not occurred. The harms of wrongful imprisonment do not exist independently. On the contrary, a continuity of harm is enabled by what can be conceptualized as a ‘domino’s effect’ where one form of harm sets off a chain of other harmful effects. In the case of victims of wrongful imprisonment, the disabling psychological trauma and mental disorders, for instance, that many suffer after release can often engender further social and economic harms by obstructing the attempts of victims to rebuild relationships with families or gain long-term, meaningful employment (see Jamieson and Grounds 2005, 34–40; Denov and Campbell 2003, 2005, 235–240; see also, Campbell and Denov 2004, 139–163). Conversely, the continuing social harms stemming from the social stigmatisation and whispering campaigns of their guilt will almost inevitably add to the psychological and emotional burdens that many victims of wrongful imprisonment sustain. Social stigma and continuing doubts about their innocence can also often cause victims of wrongful imprisonment to face physical violence by members of the public and continuing victimization by the state after their release from imprisonment. Michael O’Brien, for instance, described how he continued to face abuse by members of the public even after overturning his conviction (along with Ellis Sherwood and Darren Hall) for the murder of Cardiff newsagent Philip Saunders, of which they each spent 11 years wrongfully imprisoned for (see O’Brien and Lewis 2008): Some people did turn nasty. One time, I was in a bar in Cardiff and a woman started ranting at me that I was ‘‘that guy who murdered Philip Saunders’’. It shook me up. Other times I had a bit of abuse or people wanting to fight me. It was frightening to go to pubs or clubs. You don’t always have to be in jail to be a prisoner (O’Brien and Lewis 2008: 195). Similarly, Patrick Maguire, one of the ‘Maguire Seven’ who were wrongly convicted of manufacturing explosives for the Irish Republican Army (IRA) described how he continued to sustain a series of harassment by the Metropolitan Police for 14 years after his release, including an occasion when he was ambushed and dragged into a police van where he was kicked, stamped and punched by several officers (Maguire 2008, 380–383). The four categories of harm scoped out in Naughton’s zemiological analysis of miscarriages of justice, then, far from having independent existence which the zemiological framework tends to present, often perpetuate one another in multifaceted, overlapping forms. In addition, on an individual, micro-sociological level, harms can also be produced and reproduced through the means by which victims of wrongful imprisonment try to cope with or respond to the harms they are experiencing. It is, for example, fairly common for victims of wrongful imprisonment to adopt destructive routines such as self-isolation, alcohol or drug abuse as a means of avoiding or coping with the continuing harms they face after release which can cause the already difficult circumstances they face after release to deteriorate even further (see Grounds 2004, 171). In some of the most tragic cases, premature deaths can also result, such as Tony Steel who was reported to be taking 60 pills a day before he suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of 52, shortly after he was released from 19 years of wrongful imprisonment during which his health was ‘grievously ruined’ (Woffinden 2007); and, Sally Clark, whom, at the

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age of 42, reportedly died of alcoholism developed over the years of trying to cope with the psychological consequences of being wrongfully incarcerated for the murder of her two children (Gammell 2007). In this light, although many of the harms of wrongful imprisonment—whether physical, psychological, financial or economical are linked to the social, structural circumstances and contexts that they find themselves situated in after release, the continuity of harm and reproduction of secondary forms of harm can be conceived as often simultaneously enabled and mediated through the micro actions and strategic practices of individual victims. However, as the following section will argue, the micro actions, behaviours and attitudes of wrongful imprisonment victims can disable, as much as enable their capacity to cope with, repair and survive the forms of harm inflicted on them. Whilst zemiology tends to portray its subjects as entirely passive victims of harm, victims are also knowledgeable, social agents whom, where macro, structural conditions permit, are capable of adopting strategies to resist and even overcome the effects of the harms that they experience.

The Potential of Structuration Theory in Understanding the Post-Release Experiences of Victims of Wrongful Imprisonment Previous researches on victims of wrongful imprisonment have established the key harms and challenges that victims are confronted with after release, which are fundamental in developing this very new area of study. In addition, the foregoing analysis illustrates the utility of zemiology in providing a fuller analysis of the complex processes entailed in the production and reproduction of the harms that victims of wrongful imprisonment face after release. A limitation with zemiology, however, is that the approach appears to be entirely devoid of the notion of human agency. More specifically, the concept is underpinned by an inherent objectivism which sees harm as a one-way manifestation, produced by ‘macro’, structural conditions and impacted upon ‘victims’ who are constructed as completely passive ‘bearers’ of the social conditions they have entirely no control over (cf. Giddens 1982, 1–17, 1984, 2–3). As Stones (2005, 14) critiqued in the following terms: [Objectivism]…places all the emphasis on impersonal forces and subject-less structures, in which agents, if they are considered at all, are no more than playthings or puppets of reified social systems…objectivism treats them so derisively that they sink without trace, conceptualised as if they lack the autonomy to cause even the slightest ripple of disturbance on a social surface determined wholly by powerful and impersonal systemic tides. In an attempt to transcend the gulf between structuralism/functionalism and the hermeneutics tradition which saw subjectivity as the ‘preconstituted centre’ of human experience (Giddens 1984, 1–2), Giddens (1979, 3–5) proposed a theory of structuration which saw ‘structure’ and ‘action’ as interdependent and intimately linked in what he termed a duality. Structure, in this sense, is not simply a medium in which practices are constituted and produced, social actors are conceived as also ‘knowledgeable’ agents whose actions and practices simultaneously reproduce the social conditions, systems and structures they are situated in: The social systems in which structure is recursively implicated…comprise the situated activities of human agents, reproduced across time and space. Analysing the

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structuration of social systems means studying the modes in which such systems, grounded in knowledgeable activities of situated actors who draw upon rules and resources in the diversity of action contexts, are produced and reproduced in interaction…The constitution of agents and structures are not two independently given sets of phenomena, a dualism, but represents a duality…the structural properties of social systems are both medium and outcome of the practices they recursively organise…Structure is not to be equated with constraint but is always both constraining and enabling (Giddens 1984: 25, my emphasis). In this light, actors are never ‘cultural dopes’, but ‘knowledgeable and capable agents who reflexively monitor their actions’ (Bryant and Jary 2003, 254) by drawing upon their ‘knowledge of the social and material context’ (Giddens 1976 [1993], 90; Stones 2005, 25). For Giddens (1987, 63) this is enabled by both unconscious and conscious ‘modes of cognition’ which he termed practical consciousness—‘the (unconscious) vast variety of tacit modes of knowing how to ‘‘go on’’’; and discursive consciousness—knowledge of social systems which are consciously known to actors and can be expressed ‘on the level of discourse’ (1979, 4–5). The agency of actors is also mediated through the macro structures of society. More specifically, the ‘capabilities [of agents]… to engage in any sort of purposeful action’ are simultaneously enabled and constrained by their abilities to harness and implement ‘systems of generative rules and resources’ (Giddens 1976, 127). Rules, for Giddens (1984, 21), refer to the ‘techniques or generalizable procedures applied in the enactment/reproduction of social practices’. On the other hand, the notion of resources can be divided into ‘allocative’ and ‘authoritative’, the former connotes ‘dominion over things’ while the latter refers to ‘dominion over people’ (Bryant and Jary 2003, 255; Giddens 1979, 88–94). It is, therefore, through drawing upon these rules and resources by agents or actors that the ‘production and reproduction’ of structures occur (see Thompson 1989, 60). Giddens’s theory of structuration has substantially transformed victimological studies over the last two decades by extending the research focus from documenting harm and victimization towards the question of how victims survive the harms inflicted on them. As Walklate (1992) noted: Giddens…exhorts social scientists to face a range of questions that constitute the momentous questions of our time…Ultimately, we must decide whether to shift the research agenda away from measuring patterns of victimization and instead more fully document and explain the deeper order that produces and changes those patterns and the strategies people use to survive them (Walklate 1992: 299). More specifically, Mawby and Walklate (1994) called for a study of victims and victimhood that ‘move[s] beyond the mere appearance of things towards understanding what generates the appearance and to ask the question: what constitutes the real?’ (cited Walklate 2008, 323, my emphasis). Transcending the conventional ‘structure’ and ‘agency’ divide, this refined version of critical victimology takes seriously the need for macro-sociological research on how social, cultural and economical processes ‘underpin specific individual action at specific moments’ (Mawby and Walklate 1994, 20) and microsociological analyses on the inherent capacity of victims with agency to ‘fight for themselves against their structural constraints’ (see Marsh and Melville 2008, 104). As the theory of structuration relates to victims of wrongful imprisonment, it has a real potential to contribute to a more sociological and ontological understanding of their postrelease experiences. First, in seeing the micro and the macro, agency and structure as

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linked in an interdependent duality, structuration theory allows for the restoration of agency into victims without downplaying the harms of wrongful imprisonment engendered on a macro, structural level ‘beyond the control of the individual’ (cf. Farrall and Bowling 1999, 261).9 Second, it provides a more empowering view of victims of wrongful imprisonment which emphasises their inherent agency to strategically deal with and even survive harm. Drawing once again from existing personal accounts by victims of wrongful imprisonment, the following highlights (from an albeit inexhaustive list) a number of key critical factors that are vital to the process of reparation in order to illustrate the duality of structure and agency in the transition from victimhood to survivorship. It has to be acknowledged, however, that the various reflections by individual victims outlined below are subjectively experienced and cannot be taken as definitive of all victims of wrongful imprisonment per se. Rather, in stitching together these different voices, this exercise can be more appropriately conceived as an attempt to weave together a blueprint for further structuration grounded research on the post-release experiences of victims of wrongful imprisonment that goes beyond their harms and victimhood, towards a more empowering analysis on how victims can survive them.

The Duality of Structure and Agency and the Shift From ‘Victimhood’ to ‘Survivorship’ The event of a successful appeal and overnight release from prison can be conceptualised as what Giddens (1984, 124) would term a ‘critical situation’ in which ‘accustomed routines’ of sometimes more than a decade of prison life, overnight becomes inapplicable and irrelevant to navigating life outside prison. As Paddy Hill described the obstacles of re-adjustment after his release: It was the little things…which made me realise that adjusting to life on the outside would be a lengthy process. Having to remember to carry a key with me all the time so that I could get into the house; sorting out the right money to buy something at the shops; buying clothes…And there was food. It was not something I ever gave much thought to in jail. They gave it to you, you ate it. Simple. Now all of a sudden I was faced with all sorts of decision about food…There was no offer of counselling to help me find my feet again in this strange new world without bars; no offer of medical help to deal with the demons of anger and bitterness raging inside my head; no offer of financial advice to help me to cope with a world where the currency was pounds and pence, rather than tobacco and weed. (Hill and Hunter 1995: 257-258, 272) 9

Against Giddens, Clegg (1989) argues that the theory of structuration is ultimately subjectivist and ‘at the expense of a more structural conception of power expressed through already existing relations of domination and subordination’ (1989, 142). I would disagree with this interpretation. Whilst Giddens recognises and emphasises the agency and knowledgeability of social actors—the way in which agency is simultaneously mediated through structures is equally vital to his theory of structuration. The core of structuration theory is precisely to shift away from the primacy of agency over structure or subjectivism over objectivism (or vice versa), but to see the both as intimately linked in the duality of structure and agency (see McLennan 1984, 126, Stones 2005, 16). As this relates to victims of wrongful imprisonment, the fundamental point of this analysis is to show how, whilst there are structural, macro factors which can enable and constraint the ability of victims to survive the harms engendered upon them, their capacity to exercise their agency (albeit within the confines of the structural context and boundaries they are situated in), cannot be discounted from analyses on their post-release experiences.

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Such radical disruptions to accustomed routines, Giddens observed, can generate ‘corrosive’ and ‘regressive’ behavioural and personality changes including, withdrawal; ‘child-like dependency’; ‘a concentration upon immediate events and loss of any long term perspectives; rapid emotional oscillation between depression and elation…associated with the impact of anxiety and fear’ (1979, 125–126).10 At the same time, critical situations could also lead to a ‘new process of identification’ (Giddens 1979, 126) by creating ‘new, positive opportunities for changes in behaviour’ (cf. Farrall and Bowling 1999, 257). Against this background, the following illustrates some of the key critical situations in the life course of a victim of wrongful imprisonment that could enable their intrinsic agency to rebuild their lives after release. Relationship Formation Victims of wrongful imprisonment can face immense difficulty in rebuilding relationships with their families and loved ones after release. As Grounds (2004) reported: All the men I interviewed described difficulties in family and other close relationships. Some experience a profound estrangement, the loss of closeness that never returned…After release, these men and their families found that they no longer knew each other properly…These acknowledgements that they no longer feel close to those who stood by them during their imprisonment were difficult to admit to and a source of immense guilt. (Grounds 2004: 173) Whilst there are notable and continuing difficulties in re-building pre-existing relationships with families and loved ones, the literature on wrongful imprisonment contain examples of victims who have, over time, managed to find new partners and form new relationships which catalyse their process of reintegration after release. For Michael O’Brien, for instance, the establishment of a relationship with a new partner and assuming a parental role of her three children (Campbell 2008) appear to play a significant role in helping him ‘move on’ from being a victim of wrongful imprisonment: I don’t look on myself as a victim of a miscarriage of justice but as a survivor…Things are looking really good now. I feel that I’m on the mend and I want to make a success of my life and not always be known as one of the Cardiff Newsagent Three (my emphases) (O’Brien 2008). Similarly, for Johnny Kamara, he described how meeting his partner, the birth of his first child some 2 years after he had overturned his conviction and having to undertake parental duties as the father of his two sons have been instrumental in helping him rebuild his life after his release from 20 years of wrongful imprisonment (see Shorter 2010): What’s helped me has been having a stable relationship with someone and the kids…What really used to make me think was when I used to put the kids to bed…I sit there sometimes and think to myself: ‘‘Bloody hell – if I didn’t win that appeal, they wouldn’t be here.’’ It really makes me think about why I was fighting. (Kamara 2010) The implications of relationship formation on the post-release life course of victims of wrongful imprisonment can perhaps be conceptualised in terms of what Giddens termed 10 These behavioural changes noted by Giddens’ can in some ways be paralleled to the symptoms of PostTraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) observed from Grounds’s (2004, 2005) psychological assessment of victims of wrongful imprisonment (cf. Bracken 2001, 733–743).

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‘position-practices’. For Giddens, social systems are ‘structured ‘‘fields’’’ where social actors occupy ‘definite positions vis-a`-vis one another’. The social position or identity that an actor occupies in turn ‘carries with it a certain range (however diffusely specified) of prerogatives and obligations that an actor who is accorded that identity (or is an ‘incumbent’ of that position) may activate or carry out: these prerogatives and obligations constitute that role-prescriptions associated with that position’ (Giddens 1979, 117, original emphasis). The positive impact of forming new familial relationships, then, goes beyond having a family support network that victims of wrongful imprisonment can rely on. Applying this concept of ‘position-practices’, the formation of new social networks and relationships after their release from imprisonment is simultaneously accompanied by a new set of roles and responsibilities. Rather than overtly focusing on their losses and wrongful convictions, they now have new routines and social duties to perform, such as that of childcare and parenthood in the cases of Michael O’Brien and Johnny Kamara cited above. This assumption of new social positions or identities not only contributes to some sense of ‘normality’ and structure that is often absent at the initial stages of release for victims of wrongful imprisonment, arguably, it encourages them to move on from their victimhood by allowing the re-construction their self-identity and the formation of a self-image shaped by self-constructed discourse of survivorship: they are no longer just victims of wrongful imprisonment, but also partners, spouses or parents with social commitments to fulfill and a future to work towards and plan for. Gaining Employment The ramifications stemming from the blighted opportunity to gain meaningful employment during the years spent wrongfully imprisoned and the unemployment wrongful imprisonment victims routinely face after release are usually measured in purely financial terms of their ‘loss of earnings’, both past and future (see Taylor 2005, 117–119). However, there is also a significant intangible, socio-psychological aspect to unemployment which, whilst subjectively and individual experienced, is associated with the dominance of what Hayes and Nutman (1981, vii) termed a ‘worked oriented society’. As they noted in their ‘microstudy’ on how individuals respond to unemployment: The dominance of the work ethic is such that many of the unemployed still perceive others as viewing them within a framework characterized by such terms and phrases as ‘‘lazy’’, ‘‘workshy’’, and ‘‘living off the taxes that others have to pay’’…Even though an unemployed person is now able to view his or her predicament as being similar to that of millions of other people, the tendency we have found…is for the unemployed person to perceive his or her situation as a particular reflection of themselves. (Hayes and Nutman 1981: 6; see also, Winefield 1993: 74–75) Conversely, regaining employment or seeking job training or education can generate a positive sense of empowerment, which can facilitate the reparation process for victims of wrongful imprisonment. This is reflected in the following quotation by Anne Maguire who, along with several other members of her family, spent over a decade of incarceration following their wrongful convictions for the IRA-related bombings in Guildford and Woolwich in the late 1970s and 1980s: I need a little job to get by…Some people say I should not work at all, in that case, and should claim unemployment benefit. But I am an independent person and I’ve

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always worked. I’m proud still to do that and in any case I need a secure income, however small (Maguire and Gallagher 1994: 164). This link between employment and empowerment also illustrates the intimate structure/ agency duality underpinning the process of a wrongful imprisonment victim’s potential transition from victimhood to survivorship. Anne Maguire’s strategic decision to find a job may have been prompted by the structural conditions of poverty and deprivation that she was situated in after her release. However, in gaining employment and restructuring her financial circumstances for the better, this process can be conceived, in turn, to have produced empowering attitudinal changes crucial in her route towards regaining independence and rebuilding her life. Obtaining Financial Compensation Financial compensation under s. 133 of the Criminal Justice Act 198811 is the only way in which the state currently remedies the harms caused to qualifying individuals who are deemed to have suffered a miscarriage of justice. It is, therefore, perhaps unsurprising that in almost all biographical and auto-biographical accounts surveyed for the purpose of this article the issue of compensation is discussed. Yet, the purpose of compensation is wide-ranging. For a start, many victims of wrongful imprisonment are unable to move on unless and until they obtain compensation that satisfactorily reflects the magnitude of the devastations, losses and harms endured as a result of their wrongful imprisonment. As Paddy Hill noted: An important part of [the] future involves my claim for compensation for the ordeal I suffered, because until it is settled I cannot get on with the rest of my life (Hill and Hunt 1996: 274). Indeed, sticking to the example of Paddy Hill, his account is illustrative of how compensation is vital not only as part of seeking accountability, but to enable him to have, in Giddens’s terms, the ‘allocative resources’ to move beyond being a victim towards a different social identity—in his case, a no doubt commendable attempt to offer post-release support for other victims of wrongful imprisonment such that they will not be faced with the dire situation he found himself in after release. This is implicit in Paddy Hill’ s account of his plans to utilise his compensation to set up a miscarriage of justice campaign group which was subsequently achieved in 1999 with the founding of the Miscarriage of Justice Organisation (MOJO), a victim-support group to assist qualifying miscarriage of justice victims (see, Miscarriages of Justice Organisation 2010): …I have already earmarked a proportion of my compensation to go towards [the] formation [of the victim-support group]…As soon as my claim is settled I intend to throw myself into setting it up with the same single-minded determination that got me out of prison (Hill and Hunt 1996: 287). Whilst space constraints do not allow for an adequate critique of the limitations of the existing compensation scheme, entitlement to compensation is not automatic. Rather, this often entails a lengthy and tedious process involving psychological assessments, inquiries into how and why the miscarriage of justice occurred, and at times, can drag on for years before the final amount of compensation is settled (Tan 2009, 35). Stephen Downing’s final 11

As amended by s.61 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008.

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compensation payout was awarded more than 5 years after his release from 27 years of wrongful imprisonment for the murder of Wendy Sewell (BBC News 2006b); cousins Michael and Vincent Hickey who spent 18 years of wrongful imprisonment each for the murder of newspaper boy Carl Bridgewater, along with Michael O’Brien, took almost a decade to settle their claims after lengthy legal battles against the Home Office’s deduction of ‘saved living expenses’ from their compensations (Gibb 2007). The length of time involved in their battle for compensation often means that many victims of wrongful imprisonment are unable to have closure and find it difficult to move on from their wrongful conviction for many years after they have been released. The Need for Exoneration Very rarely are victims of wrongful imprisonment in England and Wales fully exonerated of the crimes they were convicted of. One of these cases is the case of the Cardiff Three who were proven to be factually innocent of the murder of Lynette White after DNA evidence led to the arrest and conviction of the actual perpetrator (Hughes 2009). More recently, Sean Hodgson who spent 27 years in prison was exonerated of the murder of Teresa De Simone after DNA testing on bodily fluids recovered from the crime scene showed that he was not the murderer (O’Neill 2009). The DNA profile was later found to match the exhumed remains of David Lace, a known suspect who had confessed to the murder after Hodgson’s conviction in 1982 and committed suicide shortly after (Booth 2009). For most victims of wrongful imprisonment, though, as discussed above, their successful appeals are only evidence that their convictions are unsafe in law, which do not exonerate them completely. Indeed, until such time the real perpetrator of the crimes they were wrongly convicted and imprisoned for are found, they will often continue to be confronted with ‘whispering campaigns’ of their guilt (Naughton 2006). As a result, their bid to prove their innocence often persists years after their successful appeals in calls for public inquiries to be launched or police investigations to be reopened. Returning to the case of the Cardiff Three, it took 10 years after their conviction was quashed on a ‘technicality’ for South Wales police to launch a new murder investigation which eventually let to the conviction of Jeffrey Gafoor, the real killer of Lynette White, and the exoneration of Steven Miller, Paris Abdullahi and Tony Paris (BBC News 2002). The significance of this exoneration and being proven factually innocent despite 13 years after the Cardiff Three’s successful appeal is evident in the following statement by Steven Miller: I was freed by the appeal judges, but I want everyone to know I’m innocent…But the real reason I wanted the police to find the killer is for Lynette, not for me…Lynette’s family have suffered. I want to prove to them I have nothing to do with her death. (Miller 2003) Public Apology It is true to say that a public apology, like monetary compensation, can never adequately account from the injustice and losses sustained by those who have been wrongly imprisoned. In the case of Patrick Maguire (of the Maguire Seven), for instance, he described how in his view, the apology he received from the then Prime Minister Tony Blair was of little significance: The apology from Tony Blair…didn’t mean much to me. First, Dad wasn’t with us. Second, it was just politics. Third, it was thirty years too late (Maguire 2008: 418).

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An apology, however, can significantly contribute to the reparation process for victims of wrongful imprisonment. A recent study by Penzell (2007, 145–162) on victims of wrongful conviction in the United States noted the positive impact of an apology in assisting exonerees reintegrate into society after their release from prison: Apology can positively affect exonerees’ reintegration into society after their release from prison. Exonerees who were offered an apology frequently noted its contribution to their ability to heal, restore their dignity, and reconcile themselves with society and the state. (Penzell 2007: 156) Indeed, the importance of an apology goes beyond an official acknowledge from the state of the harms inflicted upon victims of wrongful imprisonment. It is in many ways a symbolic and public reinstatement of innocence for victims of wrongful conviction who continue to face lingering doubts from the general public about their factual innocence for years after their successful appeals. As Sarah Conlon, the wife of Giuseppe Conlon (one of the Maguire Seven) and mother of Gerry Conlon (of the Guildford Four case)12 expressed in the following statement: A public apology would mean the world to me. Giuseppe [Conlon] went to jail as an IRA bomber and died in jail with people thinking he was an IRA bomber (Conlon 2005). Similarly, for Anne Maguire, the significance of a public declaration (from the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair) that the Maguire Seven and the Guildford Four should be ‘completely and publicly exonerated’ (Blair 2005) is evident: The people who were still doubting us should now believe we were totally innocent (Maguire 2005). Returning to Giddens’s theory of structuration, a person’s credibility, reputation, and trust by the wider community constitute cultural or authoritative resources necessary for a social actor to participate in social interactions and the construction and maintenance of social networks (Sydow 2000, 36–41; Giddens 1990, 36). From this perspective, the authoritative resources that victims of wrongful imprisonment need to draw from to rebuild relationships and social networks after their release can in some ways be conceived as being depleted by the social stigma and continuing public doubts about their factual innocence. By publicly acknowledging their factual innocence through an apology, this symbolic process can help to restore the damaged reputations of victims of wrongful imprisonment which can in turn assist them in regaining acceptance by their communities and facilitate their reintegration back into mainstream society after their release.

Discussion If a ‘victim’ can be loosely defined as someone who has been or is experiencing harm, the identifiable ‘survivor’ discourse present in accounts by victims of wrongful imprisonment 12 Like the Maguire Seven and the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four-Gerry Conlon, Carole Richardson, Paul Hill and Patrick Armstrong were wrongly convicted for IRA-related bombings and spent 15 years in prison until their convictions were finally quashed in 1989 (see Conlon, 1994).

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(if ‘victim’ is an appropriate term to use here), can perhaps, tentatively, be conceptualized for my purposes here as a victim who is actively trying to ameliorate the harmful conditions that s/he is situated in, whether successfully or unsuccessfully. From this perspective, ‘survivorship’ is not a permanent status that is obtained. Arguably, it would be more appropriate to conceptualise survivorship in terms of conduct and actions—the conduct of employing agency and making strategic decisions in an attempt to cope with harm and try to negate or at least minimise the structural conditions that produce harm. As social actors with agency, victims of wrongful imprisonment are constantly making strategic decisions to manage the structural obstacles and harms that they are confronted with after release. However, as with life generally, the strategies that victims of wrongful imprisonment use to help themselves manage the macro-level obstacles that they are confronted by may sometimes pay off by providing some level of economic, social, and psychological stability and sometimes these strategies may fail. At times, the new structures that they create for themselves to organise their lived realities may be destabilised by macro factors beyond their control, such as unemployment, relationship breakdown, and so on. As such, it can be conceptualised that the transition to ‘survivorship’ is not eternally obtained but, rather, a see-saw experience to be continually grappled with as they oscillate between being victims of the harms emanating from structural circumstances and devising and employing survival strategies and techniques to try to cope with them and even overcome them.13 The distinction then between a victim and a survivor can be conceived as a state of mind and a willingness to at least try to get a job, form relationships, and so on. In this sense, the post-release experiences of victims of wrongful conviction might be viewed as a continuum, rather than a linear transition between ‘victimhood’ and ‘survivorship’: their capacity for agency is constrained or curtained by the macro-structural circumstances they are situated in. Yet, as knowledgeable social actors, they are also intrinsically capable of exercising their agency to try to cope with the obstacles confronting them after release and attempt to rebuild positive structures into their lives. In highlighting a list of factors that could assist victims of wrongful imprisonment in rebuilding their lives after release—compensation, relationships, employment, exoneration, public apology—it has to be emphasised that none of the conditions listed above would automatically transform victims of wrongful imprisonment into survivors. Equally, it does not mean that victims will always remain as victims simply because they are unable to find a job, obtain compensation or form new relationships after their release. Indeed, it is acknowledged that many of the factors listed above might not be permanent: relationships could breakdown; employment gained might only be temporary; a victim could obtain compensation but lose it relatively quickly due to his or her lack of financial management skills. The factors listed above, then, are not definitive markers of a successful transformation from victimhood to survivorship. Rather, they are part of a range of conditions that might contribute to the process of reintegration and reparation for victims of wrongful imprisonment that they can actively pursue with knowing agency as they struggle to get their lives back on track after their release.

13 Thank you to the Second Anonymous Reviewer for helping me to recognise the complexities involved in the post-release experience of victims of wrongful imprisonment and to clarify the notion of ‘survivorship’.

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Conclusion Rose and Miller (1992), drawing from Foucault’s (1991, 87–104) notion of power and governmentality, gave an alternative account of the often taken-for-granted notions of ‘freedom’ and ‘autonomy’: Power is not so much a matter of imposing constraints upon citizens as of ‘‘making up’’ citizens capable of bearing a kind of regulated freedom. Personal autonomy is not the antithessis of political power, but a key term in its exercise, the more so because most individuals are not merely subjects of power but play a part in its operations (1992: 174). This perhaps aptly reflects the kind of ‘freedom’ obtained by wrongful imprisonment victims after they are freed from incarceration. The physical freedom from the oppressive regime of imprisonment does not connote a release from all other social constraints. Rather, this ‘freedom’ is contingent upon the structural arrangements of ordinary social life where individuals ‘see[k] to fulfil themselves within a variety of micro-moral domains or ‘‘communities’’—families, workplaces, schools, leisure associations, neighbourhood’ (original emphasis) (Sharma and Gupta 2006, 158), in what can be more appropriately described as a ‘structured freedom’. In the same way, for victims of wrongful imprisonment—particularly those who spent a significant period of imprisonment, their release and ‘freedom’ is simultaneously accompanied by the need to restructure their (new) lives almost from scratch. This process entails the immense challenges of forming new relationships and repairing family relationships that may have been torn apart by the years of incarceration; forming new, positive routines such as gaining employment or education; and regaining their credibility within their communities that, as shown above, can often be seriously damaged by the stigma that accompanies an albeit wrongful conviction. Whilst this article has utilised Giddens’s theory of structuration to highlight and emphasise the agency that victims of wrongful imprisonment possess to rebuild their lives after release and practise a form of survival in response to the harms inflicted upon them, it has to be stressed that this agency is at the same time enabled and constraint by wider, structural factors that they are confronted with throughout their life course after release from imprisonment. In addition, it is questionable how far the notion of knowledgeability applies to victims who already have pre-existing mental disabilities prior to their wrongful conviction and incarceration—such as Stephen Downing who had a mental age of 11 when he was wrongly convicted of the murder of Wendy Sewell (Hale 2002); Barry George who suffers from several personality disorders and sub-normal intelligence—a factor which no doubt contributed to his wrongful conviction of the murder of Jill Dando (Doward 2008), and more recently, Sean Hodgson whose mental health problems led to him falsely confessing to the murder of Teresa De Simone (O’Neill 2009). As things currently stand, the existing lack of post-release support for wrongful imprisonment victims, the lack of accountability and the inadequacy of the compensation scheme inevitably mean that the agency and capacity of victims to rebuild their lives remains highly constrained and frequently thwarted. The importance of wider, policy actions detailed above, in particular, compensation, exoneration, accountability and public apologies then become apparent, not only in terms of redressing the gross injustices and multitude of harms sustained by victims of wrongful imprisonment, but as this article attempted to illustrate, to help them to help themselves to

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move on from their wrongful convictions by exercising their agency and start the process of transition from victims to survivors. Finally, it is hoped that this attempt to ‘pilot’ a structuration analysis on the post-release experiences of wrongful imprisonment victims can serve to conceptually inform future sociological research in this area. More significantly, it is endeavoured that this analysis can constructively contribute towards a meaningful model of ‘aftercare’ or what should be more appropriately termed ‘post-release support’ for victims of wrongful imprisonment that recognises both the magnitude of the injustices they suffered and at the same time, the inherent agency in victims to positively rebuild and restructure their, albeit unjustly, broken lives. Acknowledgments I am tremendously grateful to Michael Naughton for his unstinting encouragement and assistance with previous drafts. I would also like to express my gratitude to the two Anonymous Reviewers for their critical engagement and constructive comments on the original submission which have forced me to clarify my thoughts and undoubtedly improved the article. The usual caveat applies—any errors or mistakes are my own.

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