Month: June 2012

This post is the introduction and conclusion of a new book chapter of the same title — I promised to put this chapter in the Useful Resources page a while ago and have recently received permission for the editor in question to do so, so here it is. (if it whets your appetite, you can now find the full chapter in the Useful Resources page):

Introduction

The title of this chapter may seem an odd one. For many people, punishment and rehabilitation are alternatives between which we must choose, rather than potential synonyms or alternative ways of referring to similar processes. Can punishment ever be rehabilitation? Don’t rehabilitation’s supporters tend to see offending as rooted in people’s experience of social exclusion and injustice, to regard the trope of individual (criminal) responsibility (on which the legitimacy of punishment ultimately depends) as misconceived, and to stress the duty of the state somehow to fix the mess that produced crime? Punishment, at least for some rehabilitationists, seems little more than a fancy cloak to drape around the otherwise nakedly vengeful instincts of those that think (absurdly, these critics would argue) that there is something sensible, appropriate and fair about piling hurt on hurt.

And yet, many practitioners of rehabilitation – even those sympathetic to these criticisms of punishment – hold on to a belief in the capacity of people to change themselves and their situations; to make different choices; to overcome their circumstances; to author a different and better future. Even those who are deterministic when it came to the genesis of criminal behaviors and problems, somehow seem to become believers in free will or the power of human agency (even under intense social and structural pressures) when it come to the future prospects of people undergoing rehabilitation. Moreover, many rehabilitationists also have an acute sense of justice or injustice, reflected in their demands that the state honor its obligations to those whose adverse life experiences have proved ‘criminogenic’.

Readers will already have noted a number of paradoxes and possible contradictions in play here, in terms of how we conceive of individual and political responsibility for crime and other social harms, of how we understand and deliver fairness and justice, and in our approaches to the righting of wrongs. To try to unravel some of these threads and make sense of these questions requires an examination of the contested and multiple meanings of these two terms – rehabilitation and punishment – before we can begin to understand at least some of the potential inter-relationships between them.

[…]

Conclusion: When is Punishment Rehabilitation?

Returning finally to Raynor and Robinson’s (2009) discussion of rehabilitation, with which we began, we can now clearly discern four main forms or meanings of rehabilitation. In a recent paper (McNeill, 2012), I have called these psychological, judicial, social and moral rehabilitation. These are the four strands of rehabilitation that must be ‘de-fankled’ in order for us to analyze their inter-relationships and mutual dependencies^[1]. 

 By psychological rehabilitation, I mean essentially what Raynor and Robinson (2009) refer to as correctional rehabilitation that seek to somehow change or restore the offender; to develop new skills or abilities, to address and resolve deficits or problems. A better, less loaded term, might be ‘personal rehabilitation’, since this need not imply that any specific disciplinary perspective or set of techniques is implied in this project of personal change.

The second form of rehabilitation concerns the practical expression of Beccaria’s concern with the requalification of citizens; this is judicial rehabilitation – which raises questions of when, how and to what extent a criminal record and the formal stigma that it represents can ever be set aside, sealed or surpassed. Maruna (2011b) has recently argued cogently that efforts to sponsor rehabilitation and reform must address the collateral consequences of conviction – mostly notably its stigmatising and exclusionary effects — or be doomed to fail. No amount of correctional or psychological or personal rehabilitation, and no amount of supporting offenders to change themselves, can be sufficient to the tasks and challenges of reintegration, resettlement and reentry, if legal and practical barriers are left in place.

But these barriers are not just legal – they are moral and social too.  A solely correctional, psychological or personal conception of rehabilitation is inadequate to the moral and social offence that crime represents. In simple terms, doing something for or to or (better) with the offender, even something that aims at somehow changing them so as to reduce future victimisation, fails to engage with other key aspects of dispensing justice. Perhaps most importantly in moral terms, psychological rehabilitation offers no moral redress per se; it operates only on the individual ‘offender’, not on the conflict itself and not on the victim or the community (Zedner, 1994). In Duff’s (2005) terms, it leaves the relational breach unrepaired. Critically, reparation – and reparative work in particular — seems capable of fulfilling this function in ways in which psychological rehabilitation in and of itself cannot, perhaps principally because reparation seems better able to convey (not least visibly) that redress is being actively provided. Though, as Duff (2005) reminds us, willingly undergoing psychological rehabilitation can convey the sincerity of the offender’s apology and of his or her desire to change, it is more typically a professionalised, private and secretive business, and not one that is explicitly bound into a process of moral rehabilitation.

Reparation perhaps speaks to the insistence that moral demands have to be satisfied, and moral communication secured, before moral rehabilitation can be recognised (Duff, 2001, 2003, 2005). In simple terms, an offender has to ‘pay back’ or to ‘make good’ before s/he can ‘trade up’ to a restored social position as a citizen of good character (McNeill and Maruna, 2010). As Bazemore (1998) has argued, redemption needs to be earned. This is not necessarily bad news for rehabilitation; as the Scottish Prison Commission (2008, para 33) noted, ‘one of the best ways for offenders to pay back is by turning their lives around’. But it does mean that rehabilitation theories and practices need to engage much more explicitly than hitherto with questions of justice and reparation.

Ultimately, even where psychological or personal issues are tackled, legal requalification is confirmed and moral debts are settled, the question of ‘social rehabilitation’ remains. In European jurisprudence, the concept of ‘social rehabilitation’ entails both the restoration of the citizen’s formal social status and the availability of the personal and social means to do so (Van Zyl Smit and Snacken, 2009). But here, I mean instead something that is broader, deeper and more subjective; specifically, the informal social recognition and acceptance of the reformed ex-offender.  This, rather than the advancement of the ‘science’ of correctional rehabilitation, is perhaps the ultimate problem for rehabilitation today in practice.

Ultimately, I have tried in this chapter to disentangle rehabilitation and instead to show how its four forms might, in fact, constitute not a Scots ‘fankle’, but a kind of Celtic knot; one that weaves together these four strands and reveals their interdependencies. ‘Constructive punishment’, to use Duff’s term, can be rehabilitative; it should be rehabilitative; it must be rehabilitative. But it can only work to prevent crime if it also works to deliver justice, and that requires attention to all four strands. 

[If you want to read more: When Punishment is Rehabilitation (Fergus McNeill, 2012)]

Due to popular demand here’s a sneak preview of the film, “The Road from Crime” – http://vimeo.com/43519157

Let us know what you think.

The film will be available to purchase from July, and will be freely available to download in September. Details of how to buy/download will be posted here shortly. Not long to go!

 

hi,

For those you haven’t been able to get to see the film yet, I’ll be showing it at Leeds University on the afternoon of the 12th November. This will be an ewvent co-organised with the Howard League and will run before The Frank Dawtry lecture that same evening (also at Leeds Univ).

I’ll post further details nearer the time.

 

Steve

 

 

 

This post reproduces a short introduction that I was asked to write for a forthcoming evaluation report from Circles South East/HTVC Youth Services, who are also about to run a conference (on 6th July) to celebrate ten years of running Circles of Support and Accountability. I’ll be speaking at the conference. If anyone wants to attend, one or two places remain available: call 01235 816050 for more details.

Five years ago, I published a book on Reducing Reoffending (co-authored with Bill Whyte). The book covered a lot of familiar ground in relation to what we think we know by now about ‘what works?’ to support that outcome, but it also tried to look beyond that question by engaging more fully with the question of why and how people desist from crime. Exploring that evidence base produced a ‘Towards effective practice’ section of three chapters. The first the nature and processes of ‘offender management’ or (as we preferred to put it) change management; the second looked at how we could support the development of human capital (meaning the skills, knowledge and capacities) of people moving away from crime. There was then (and still is) plenty of material to draw on in writing those two chapters.

The third chapter in that section (and the final chapter in the book) posed more of a challenge. Our reading of the evidence about desistance – not least from the work of leading researchers like Jon Laub and Robert Sampson in the US and Steve Farrall in the UK – made obvious the need to look beyond the role of interventions in supporting personal change and to consider how social reintegration might be accomplished. Developing positive (or legitimate) social capital – meaning essentially the networks of relationships that generate and support opportunities — is central to the desistance process. Yet back in 2007, very little had been written about how professionals and others in and around the criminal justice system might undertake that task.

Unsurprisingly, the chapter starts out with theory – looking at the different ways in which Pierre Bourdieu, James Coleman and Robert Putnam had developed and deployed the concept of social capital. It was easy enough to go on and provide evidence about how a lack of social capital seems to be apparent amongst persistent offenders and, more generally, in high crime communities. People in these circumstances might have tight ties to kith and kin (‘bonding social capital’ in the jargon), but they lack the kind of social capital that ‘bridges’ or ‘links’ them into new opportunities for living differently.

Despite that kind of bridge building – not least with local organisations, communities and employers – being a key part of probation’s history, by the turn of the century it seemed to have gone out of fashion; working on the ‘offender’ not with and around the person seemed to be the preferred approach by then. In the chapter, we followed Farrall in suggesting a re-engagement in working with families; both families of origin and families of formation, pointing to the importance of ‘generativity’ (making a positive contribution to the wellbeing of others) in the desistance process. We also argued for revival of community engagement and for proactive work with employers. Regrettably, we didn’t mention Circles of Support and Accountability in that chapter; perhaps I hadn’t come across the developing literature around COSA by 2006, when I was writing Reducing Reoffending. When I did, it wasn’t too difficult to join the dots (it is no accident that a collection I edited on ‘Offender Supervision’ in 2010 does provide coverage of COSA).

COSA impress and inspire me so much because they focus their not on the ‘low-hanging fruit’ of those that might be most easily reintegrated but on those for whom the process is at its most challenging; those who are amongst the most vilified and isolated people in our society. Social capital is essentially about trust and reciprocity – about building and honouring relationships. The violations of trust and relationships, and the corruptions and failures of reciprocity involved in serious sexual offending, and in societal reactions to sexual offending, therefore make the development of social capital for this group of people especially challenging.      

And yet, the evidence is that COSA can and do succeed in supporting reintegration and in keeping people safe. Moreover, they do it not through the imposition of incapacitation and control – not through a reliance on containing, constraining or excluding a threat, but through human processes of accountability, support and monitoring that enable, encourage and engender change. Basically, good people helping other people live better lives.

As an academic criminologist, I have to recognise both the strengths and weaknesses of the evidence base for COSA as a means of reducing reconviction. As with any intervention seeking that goal with this population, they face profound methodological challenges in seeking to ‘prove’ their effectiveness – among them problems of low base rates, selection effects, statistical significance, whether and how to run RCTs, and even more fundamental problems of how exactly to define success and failure.

But evidence is steadily accumulating, and perhaps we can and should begin to think about it in a different way. Desistance theory helps us to understand why COSA should work, and why they may work to support change. We know that their approach is based on helping to build relatedness and belonging and to create the relational contexts of inter-personal accountability that help all of us to live better and more rewarding lives. In this sense, they are and should be as much about doing ‘the good’ as they are about avoiding ‘the bad’. Perhaps that should be the focus of our evaluation of COSA, and of their further development. Better lives for better citizens, bounded and enriched by mutual accountabilities. Reciprocity has shaped human evolution – it still shapes human and social development. That’s how and why Circles work not just to avoid further damage, but to build something better.