Labouring in the shadows: hope, fear and bureaucratic harms in navigating risk with “dangerous people”: an examination of Scotland’s Order for Lifelong Restriction

Ceesay, Nicola Khadijiah (2026) Labouring in the shadows: hope, fear and bureaucratic harms in navigating risk with “dangerous people”: an examination of Scotland’s Order for Lifelong Restriction. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

This thesis offers a qualitative account of the Order for Lifelong Restriction (OLR) a risk-based sentence for public protection which became available to the Scottish Courts in 2006. The legislative base for the order sets a new governance framework and the introduction of the Risk Management Authority, which deploys a raft of heavily audited, bureaucratic procedures, and processes designed to gain control over a subgroup of serious violent and sexual offenders. As its distinctive nomenclature suggests, the sentence allows for the lifelong restriction, in the form of confinement or, where release is granted, community supervision and control of those thought to pose an ongoing risk to public safety. This highly administrative form of justice denotes a shift from deserts-based criminal punishment, and is tout court, a form of life sentence through incapacitation and lifelong control measures. The sentence is established and operates through adherence to risk-based imperatives. The majority of those subject to the OLR are currently held in prisons beyond the punishment part of their sentences on the basis that they remain dangerous. This thesis brings to the fore, a number of important human consequences regarding preventive punishment for penal agents and those subject to the order. For penal actors toiling under the rubric of risk and the precautionary principle, this work imposes a series of emotional and bureaucratic burdens as they are exposed and bear witness to the harms of risk-based work and its internal logics. Through operating the sentencing and management process, penal agents are tasked with balancing public protection with care and control. They are assigned with the intractable problem of neutralising the risk of an imprecise and contradictory ‘motley crew’ deemed unmanageable by any other means. In performing risk labour, penal agents are vicariously exposed to the harms for which the OLR has been imposed which engenders dread risks (Slovic, 1987) and associated fears and anxieties. This heavy burden is amplified by a fear of future harm, wrong decision-making and reputational annihilation. The ‘exceptional’ sentence imposes a new identity on the penal subject, tainting them with the permanent mark of dangerousness. Themes of hopelessness and despair, bleed from the condemned subjects, vicariously contaminating criminal justice agents in a way that hinders their work, conflicts with human, professional and criminal justice values having implications for a ‘hope standard’ in punishment (Brownlee, 2021:589). At its most poignant, the mark of the Order signifies a banishing of the risky individual, who through the criminal justice process, is colonised and stripped of agency and reduced to an object of bureaucratic control. The machinery of risk operates a labyrinthine system of processes, characterised by opaque objectives and practices which entrenches OLR subjects, and those who work with them, in endless loops of paperwork and process. Moreover, while introduced as a purveyor of risk, this highly restrictive form of sentencing and management, generates its own risk(s) and its own forms of complexity, harm and institutional violence, through the risk-based imperatives of its own making. This qualitative study was conducted by exploring the perspectives of criminal justice practitioners directly involved in the sentencing, management, and care of individuals subject to the OLR.

• Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
• Qualification Level: Doctoral
• Keywords: Scotland, Risk, Order for Lifelong Restriction, indeterminate sentencing, preventive detention, fear, emotional harms, hope, bureaucracy, institutional absurdities.
• Subjects: H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform; K Law > KD England and Wales > KDC Scotland
• Colleges/Schools: College of Social Sciences > School of Social and Political Sciences
• Supervisor's Name: Armstrong, Professor Sarah and Sparks, Professor Richard
• Date of Award: 2026
• Depositing User: Theses Team
• Unique ID: glathesis:2026-85985
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 01 Jun 2026 08:25
• Last Modified: 01 Jun 2026 08:28
• Thesis DOI: 10.5525/gla.thesis.85985
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/85985