This study considers ethical questions of freedom and reconciliation in Jimmy Boyle’s autobiographical A Sense of Freedom (2016). A Scottish life prisoner, Boyle describes a moral phenomenology of freedom and reconciliation through his life and his time in prisons, including Glasgow’s Barlinnie Special Unit. Promoting mature democratic relations between prisoners and staff, the Unit enabled development and change in participants’ moral psychology. Boyle’s ‘sense of freedom’ moves from negative forms of refusal, resistance and withdrawal to ever more positive forms: abstract ideal freedom, emancipatory agency, trust, collective empowerment, taking responsibility, coming alive and loving creativity. Reconciliation recognised the human in the enemy, mature engagement, democratic involvement and thinking socially and politically beyond the prison. This metaphysics transcending violence was grounded in Boyle’s metapsychology as one capable of love. The chapter draws on earlier discussions of freedom and reconciliation in the young Hegel, recognition and complex victimhood, atonement and mature retributivism. The penal system is seen as combining a persecutory impulse in the major key and humanistic traces in the minor, a ‘structure in dominance’ of the former over the latter. Barlinnie Special Unit inverted this structure briefly, pointing to a deep abolitionist tendency inside what became ‘the loving prison’.

Mature retributivism from Chapters 7 and 8 involves a metaphysics and metapsychology of the animal that thinks and loves. Its moral psychology underpins deep or tendential penal abolition around five claims. First, mature retributivism is preferrable to punishment. It offers individual and social change rather than repetitive violence by means of a punitive response which fails to change behaviour. Second, vindictive, vindicative and validatory forms of state action are distinguished. Abolition delinks law’s morally vindicative power from punitive vindictiveness, aligning it with a broader moral validation. This allows perpetrators, victims and a community to deal with violation through reconciliation. Third, abolition involves dispositional and relational responsibility allowing the violator to own acts in a social setting rather than simply be blamed and punished for them. Fourth, while this looks unrealistic in the face of the ‘adverse experience’ (Kant 1993: 246) available in modern society around crime and punishment, it involves a real utopian argument based on real human ontology. Its underlying realism challenges proponents and critics to take seriously moral change and violation. It also suggests that the slogan ‘Abolition now!’ must distinguish an immanent truth from an imminent demand. Fifth, the violative and asymmetric relation between ‘a doer’ and a ‘done-to’ remains central to the abolitionist position requiring reconciliatory change at both individual and social levels.

The primitive and mature kinds of guilt in Freud identified in Chapter 7 are revisited and related to the two parallel kinds of guilt Melanie Klein finds in infant life in the paranoid–schizoid and depressive states. In both accounts, guilt is seen to be either primitive and persecutory or mature and restorative, and these are foundational for adult life. I take the two accounts so consolidated to represent different ways of organising guilt in modern social, political and legal practices. I argue that legal guilt as understood in existing retributive theory is essentially primitive and punitive and consider the counter-productive impact of a persecutory penal regime on the immature and the maturing psyche. I argue that an alternative approach based on a mature retributivism is possible. I consider Jeffrie Murphy’s view that there is no logical reason why retributive theory should lead to persecutory practice and argue that there is an historical logic behind it. A mature retributivism based in moral psychology on a person taking responsibility leads to a conception of guilt as reparative and reconciliatory. This constitutes an ethically real basis for critique of law’s existing institutional practice, in what I call an ERIC critique.