‘I sit somewhere in that sort of sweet spot’: Liminal legitimacy in criminal justice practice

This article examines how trust, legitimacy, and credibility are constructed in criminal justice practice through the work of lived experience professionals – individuals whose authority derives from embodied histories of punishment as well as professional practice. Drawing on 16 interviews with lived experience professionals and mentees across prison, probation, and community settings, the study uses Reflexive Thematic Analysis within a multi-theoretical framework combining Foucauldian analyses of disciplinary power with scholarship on legitimacy, desistance, and embodied practice. Four themes are identified: the persistence of a structural ‘ them and us ’ divide; the emergence of liminal legitimacy within disciplinary boundaries; the development of a desistance habitus through embodied skills, cultural fluency, and moral authority; and the contested label of peer , which simultaneously enables authenticity while reproducing stigma and constraint. The findings show that lived experience professionals occupy a necessary yet precarious position within penal systems, generating relational legitimacy within the architectures of surveillance and control. Lived experience practice therefore emerges as both rehabilitative and penal in character, operating from within rather than outside the logics of contemporary punishment. The analysis reframes lived experience work as stratified legitimacy work, showing that authority is negotiated through symbolic, relational, and organisational mechanisms rather than assumed through shared biography alone.