Placing lived experience at the heart of systemic change in prisons

In this expert blog for Penal Reform International, Dwayne Antojado highlights that meaningful involvement of people with lived experience of imprisonment is essential for creating truly human-centred justice systems. His work shows that co-designed education, authentic representation, and narrative methods deepen understanding of imprisonment, while fair support and decision-making roles for affected individuals turn personal stories into lasting expertise. These findings align with calls for ethical, diverse, and sustained participation to reform criminal justice in ways that prioritise those most impacted. 

Across the globe, calls for human-centred justice have gathered momentum, yet far too often discussions progress about people in prison rather than with them. I recently co-authored academic papers which discuss and demonstrate that meaningful inclusion of those who have endured the criminal legal system is not an optional add-on to systemic change but a core pathway to establishing and creating people-centred justice systems – where those who have been historically left behind do not just become agents but leaders of change.  

The first article explores teaching spaces and shows that when people with custodial histories help design and deliver learning, courses about prisons (and the broader criminal legal system) comes alive in ways that disrupt familiar hierarchies. Students encounter knowledge that is grounded in the phenomenological, autoethnographical, autobiographical, sensory, emotional, affective, atmospheric textures of confinement, while lecturers are prompted to reflect on their own positioning. This meeting of voices does more than animate lecture halls, it seeds professional cultures that remain alert to the everyday harms of the penal estate using the voices that are most affected. 

The second paper adapts Hanna Pitkin’s framework of representation into the way in which the criminal legal system operates. It cautions that welcoming only a few, unrepresentative, spokespersons will not suffice in ethically grounding and embedding lived experience into criminal legal processes. Genuine representation must be descriptive, embracing diversity across gender, culture, sexuality; it must be substantive, granting real influence over decision-making; and it must be reflexive, remaining open to critique from the communities whose experiences it claims to convey. Without these safeguards, lived experience can slip into token display. 

The third paper expands the conversation from pedagogy to the academy’s knowledge infrastructure. Here the argument is that narrative forms of enquiry: autoethnography, creative writing, and oral history, are not poor cousins to positivist and empirical modes of enquiry. Rather, they reveal dimensions of punishment that conventional metrics miss: the hum of fluorescent lights that erode sleep, the anxiety of waiting by the phone for a delayed call, the bittersweet taste of first freedom. When such insights are placed alongside other methodologies and other ‘ways of knowing,’ the resulting picture of imprisonment is both thicker, nuanced and more holistic. 

The fourth and most recent article traces the journey from storytelling to policy influence. It shows that autoethnographic testimony is only the opening move. To become durable expertise, personal knowledge requires peer mentorship, fair remuneration, trauma-informed supervision and pathways into roles that carry decision-making-power. That is, ways in which ‘lived experience expertise’ becomes legible in the present regime of criminology and the criminal legal system: to change the system from within. In other words, institutions must be redesigned so that people who have lived through imprisonment, punishment and other forms of exclusion that the criminal legal system imposes, sit not only on advisory boards but also on research teams, governmental and legislative bodies, and in positions of power. 

So, what can we learn from this research? 

Taken together, these findings speak directly to Penal Reform International’s five-year strategy and ten point plan, both of which commit to centring people who have experienced prison or other forms of criminal legal control. The research points towards several overlapping insights. 

First, co-production improves the quality of evidence. When people affected by punishment shape research questions, data collection tools and analysis, they illuminate facets of institutional life that often remain invisible. Issues such as the sensory stress of overcrowded cells, the corrosive effect of constant fluorescent lighting, or the bureaucratic maze that families must navigate to arrange visits emerge as policy-relevant matters rather than private grievances. Equipped with such granular knowledge, advocates can push for reforms that speak to lived reality, not abstract principle. 

Secondly, authentic participation enhances legitimacy. Public audiences, from community groups to parliamentary committees, tend to view lived experience contributors as credible precisely because their analysis is anchored in embodied reality. This perception of authenticity can help neutralise cynicism and apathy that often greets technocratic reform proposals and can build consensus across ideological divides. 

Thirdly, plurality within lived experience is essential. Carceral systems do not affect everyone in the same way. Women, queer people, racialised groups, older persons, people with neurodiversity, and people with disabilities each confront distinct harms. A commitment to lived experience that fails to capture such variation risks reinforcing existing silences. Intentional outreach, through community partnerships, peer networks and multiple languages, for example, ensures that no single narrative claims the status of universal truth. 

Fourthly, engagement must be ethical and sustainable. Many contributors carry unresolved trauma; some may be on parole or continue to live with the collateral consequences of conviction. Safeguards, which include confidential counselling, control over the use of one’s narrative, and the right to withdraw, are therefore non-negotiable. In addition, equity demands fair pay that reflects the intellectual labour involved, rather than volunteer stipends that inadvertently devalue expertise. 

What, then, might these insights mean for emerging reform efforts? 

One concrete step is to establish standing advisory groups made up of people with lived experience with real power to make change in various facets of the criminal legal system (especially prisons), who would meet regularly, set their own agendas and feed directly into organisational decision-making. Another is to embed co-designed research across all levels of the prison system. Rather than commissioning external studies that treat people in prison as data points, governmental organisations and academic bodies could pair academic researchers with community and lived experience experts as equal co-investigators, sharing ownership of findings, recommendations and dissemination. A further move involves capacity building: writing workshops, public speaking, coaching and leadership mentoring help transform acts of storytelling into sustained policy engagement, while also resisting the burnout that can follow repetitive retelling of traumatic experiences. In parallel, organisations must track who is at the table, and whether true inclusion is being made possible. Finally, feedback loops matter. Publishing plain language summaries that explain how lived experience advice has altered policy or practice signals respect and nurtures trust. These shifts will not happen overnight. They require resources, institutional humility and a willingness to share power. Yet the scholarship reviewed here makes one point unmistakably clear: people who have endured punishment already carry analytical tools forged in hardship. When communities and its institutions create genuine space for that capability, moving from story as spectacle to experience as expertise, systems become more attuned to human-centred philosophies that put the person first.