The HOPE Project explores the meaning of the notion of ‘hope’ while serving a life sentence in prison. At a time when prison populations are rapidly ageing in the UK and around the world, the project focuses on older prisoners, who are often least likely to be released. It compares how hope in law, lived in daily prison life, and supported or restricted by staff. By combining legal research with life stories from inside prisons, the HOPE project questions whether prolonged incarceration remains legitimate in the face of ageing and declining health.

By bridging human rights law with lived experience, the project aims to:

• Understand hope as a lived experience of imprisonment, drawing on diaries, interviews, and observations in prisons.

• Examine how prison staff foster or withhold hope, and what this means for safety, rehabilitation, and reinsertion.

• Connect law with practice, studying how the “right to hope” under European human rights law is reflected, or not, in daily prison life.

• Develop collaborative approaches to penal reform, bringing together prisoners, judges, policymakers, HM Prison and Probation Service, the Ministry of Justice, and the voluntary sector.

• Inform policy and practice, offering insights to better support older prisoners while sparking broader debate about the future of life sentences.

Through this work, the HOPE project shows how appealing keywords such as hope are not just legal ideals or principles, but a vital feature of prison life with profound implications for justice, human rights and humanity.