Overall, I wrote around 200 pages of ethnographic fieldwork notes from courts and prisons, I conducted 35 qualitative interviews with prisoners serving indeterminate sentences and 15 interviews with judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys, observed 16 court cases and I transcribed, coded and analyzed these data.
Throughout the project, I have presented at workshops, seminars and conferences both nationally and internationally. I have maintained my strong ties to the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge and universities in Norway through the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship. I have disseminated findings in 10 national and international workshops and conferences, 7 of which were invited presentations.
Together with my Marie Skłodowska-Curie supervisor Louise Victoria Johansen, I wrote a chapter titled "Moral Communication in Court" in the anthology ‘Courtroom Ethnography: Exploring contemporary approaches, fieldwork and challenges’. Lisa Flower & Sarah Klosterkamp who are both renowned socio-legal scholars edited the book. Citation and DOI: Johansen, L.V. Laursen, J. (2023). Moral Communication in Court. In: Flower, L., Klosterkamp, S. (eds) Courtroom Ethnography. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37985-7_11(opens in new window). Read the chapter here:
2534132f-4deb-4a5c-b945-14f81b96c0f5(opens in new window).html
Importantly, the IndeSent project was extended with a year because I received a Carlsberg Foundation Fellowship (running from 2023-2024). This extension of the project means that I have almost a year left to arrange a workshop and publish these articles:
1) A descriptive paper on indeterminate sentencing and imprisonment. This article will be important for lawyers, judges, and other professionals working directly with indeterminate sentencing.
2) An article titled ’Ethical loneliness, (radical) hope and the indeterminate sentence’ in Theoretical Criminology – a high-impact, international journal. The article is using a moral philosophy framework to analyse how indeterminate prisoners feel abandoned by the State, the prison and themselves. This article will make an important contribution to the field of long-term imprisonment because of its novel empirical and theoretical foundation.
3) An article titled ’Punishment as a ‘contract’ between the State and the indeterminately sentenced’. This article is important because it tries to do what prisons researchers often struggle to do, namely theorize the State. The article takes its analytical departure in the relationship long-term prisoners have with the Danish State (represented by both the prosecution, judges, and the Prison Service), which they essentially portray as a ‘contract’. I will submit this article to the British Journal of Criminology.
4) An article titled ‘The peaceful prison – indeterminacy, power and order’, which will be published in the Nordic Journal of Criminology. This article was spurred on by my fascination by the fact that some prisons feel quiet, settled and organised rather than chaotic, violent and coercive. Based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with prisoners serving indeterminate sentences, I aim to explain why this particular prison is largely characterised by order and peacefulness despite the fact that it holds prisoners serving long sentences for very serious crime.
5) An article on indeterminate sentencing as a ’pocket of punitiveness’ in "Incarceration" as part of a Themed Issue edited by myself and a PhD student. This article argues that indeterminate sentencing can be conceptualized as a ‘pocket’ of extreme measures in a penal context otherwise characterized by short prison sentences.
All of these articles will be Open Access.
