Month: October 2012

Who do you think you are?

This guest post comes from Dee Wilde-Walker who is a former shop steward, management trainer, consultant supervisor, psychotherapist and offender… in that order. She is now exploring how she can use her knowledge and experience to creatively contribute towards improving society as a desister.

Many moons ago, Marilyn Ferguson wrote a book called “The Aquarian Conspiracy” in which she compared the types of thinking behind a variety of existing social memes (follow the link above for an explanation of the term) with the likely changes an Age of Aquarius would bring to collective thinking. It’s been years since I read it but one story she told stays vivid in my memory. This is what I recall:-
Someone had decided to do research on the social backgrounds of successful people working in New York’s Wall Street. Whilst all the usual educational suspects put in an appearance, there was also a surprise. Two or three of the most successful traders, it turned out, had emerged from the slums of Chicago – they had been born into deep poverty and yet had still managed to succeed. The researchers were fascinated by this and dug a little deeper to find out more about this anomaly. What they unearthed has significance for anyone interested in desistance: the reasons underpinning this success could be traced back to a single teacher working in their slum school who, with personal encouragement, had taught her pupils anything was possible.
This remarkable tale, complete with all the mistakes of my memory, holds the key to anyone interested in desistance on both sides of the criminal justice divide. In the few weeks since I’ve stumbled across desistance, as both subject and possibility, I’ve watched a probation officer tweet about sessions they’ve had with clients experiencing a breakthrough in their rehabilitation and the satisfaction they felt as they were able to shift from offender management to desistance support. I’ve also watched a desister tweet about the moment when a probation officer enabled them to achieve their own breakthrough. In both cases, the common denominator was shared humanity between the two. In psychotherapy, this is called the ‘therapeutic alliance’ and means that the issue ceases to be yours or mine but becomes ours. It’s a shift that brings two heads to a shared problem rather than the perpetuating the old-style ‘blame game’ where the potential desister loses whilst the criminal justice system, personified within a single practitioner, wins.
Current memes around criminal justice – particularly when focussed on harsh punishment – suffuse our present ‘operating systems’. The divide between the offended society as a whole and the individual criminal can be so wide that it seems impossible to bridge. That these bridges are being built, here and there, are testaments to the capacity of some to step outside such memes and bring humanity to bear upon the situation. The idea of desistance challenges and confronts punishing ideas by opening up new possibilities and inviting, rather than demanding, change.
We all suffer from these negative social memes and what they do is to destroy trust. This social perspective means ‘criminals’ become the great collective unwanted deserving of exile. Having experienced this condemnation personally, from my offence through the police, courts, prison and probation, the message I internalised was that society saw no value in me at all. My response to such institutionalised attrition was to become suicidal – if society thinks I’m so worthless, my thinking went, then the only socially responsible act available to me was to die. That I am still here stands as a tribute to all those professionals who were able to step beyond this and bring their own humanity to bear on the situation I was presenting to them. Each of them, in their own individual way, communicated through their words and actions, that there was something valuable about me which they thought worthy of life. Like the teacher working in the slum schools of Chicago, they offered an alternative way of thinking about our circumstances through their capacity to be human as well as professional.
Clearly, not every pupil goes on to become successful on Wall Street in much the same way as not every criminal chooses desistance. What is important is that the choice is there. Not all of us are cut out to rise to dizzy heights in order to be successful. What is interesting is that some of us are and, in manifesting our own personal potential, we open up the cracks in traditional memes enabling others to slip past the clashing rocks of systemic attrition. At the present time, desisters appear to be exceptions to the meme and I speak out because I want to contribute to a society where it becomes the norm.  To achieve that we, as a society, are going to need to change our values.
The problem for desisters is the audience attached to punishment. In speaking out, I can ‘hear’ the collective eyebrows-raised and the question “Who do you think you are, talking to me like that?” In some instances, I’ve even known this to be written down! My response is this; ‘I am someone who knows what it is to be poor and denied access to a justice system that was supposed to treat everyone equally but didn’t turn out that way.’ That the vast majority of ‘criminals’ emerge from the poorest communities is well known and is frequently accompanied by social failures in other areas, such as education, work and emotional literacy. These particular values belong to middle-class assumptions about life that frequently bear little or no resemblance to the lives of those they seek to govern. Whilst my own background may be middle-class, the experience of poverty gave me a taste of what occurs within a community attached to these traditional memes. I fell outside the assumed protection of the law until it seemed that the only route available to me, in order to deal with the problems I was experiencing, was to behave in a way that was criminal. This is not to say I was right and it’s certainly not how I would choose to be. What I am suggesting is that such experiences are common for those who aren’t born into middle-class privilege and they heighten the abyss between the offender and society. Seeking authentic and effective resolutions to the issues of crime and recidivism means that we have to get down to where the problems actually are, addressing them in real terms and not with some pretty theory detached from an offender’s authentic reality. In addition, I suspect that any lessons learned from such initiatives would benefit the whole of the community because they would be required to address the social issues that contribute to these problems.
In listening to desisters, society opens up its mind to the real causes of crime rather than the hypocrisy of always blaming offenders it preferred did not exist. The real issue is we prefer crime didn’t happen but the reality is that it does. What seems to occur, from my experience, is that society then transfers our preference for no crime on to the people who commit them. We don’t want them to exist instead. The problem here is that it seems our preferences start wandering into murderous territory because we are seeking to eliminate the person, not the crime. If society is entertaining murderous thoughts about offenders, what chance has a desister within such social memes?
That it is possible for a slum school teacher to inspire her pupils to great heights of social success indicates that there might be ways out of this traditional thinking that imprison us all.That it is possible for a forensic psychiatrist to personally introduce attitudinal changes, transforming his patients in the process, points to the same possibility. We can’t go back and change the past, as one officer appeared to require during my own probation, but we can change our attitudes to the future.
This piece is a good example. It was commissioned by those with an active interest in exploring desistance. Here, even as a beginner in this subject, I am able to walk through the doors of open minds. Whatever obstacles we encounter as we travel further down these new ways of thinking, there is one quality likely to be keeping us company; the feeling of gratitude. Whilst I, as a desister, may have a lot of ideas and opinions on the subject, to be invited to share them is the psychological equivalent of being released from this prison-of-the-mind into a society actively supporting my efforts at redemption. That is an awful lot to be grateful for.

Once there were four, now there are five (maybe)…

Months ago I wrote a post entitled ‘Four forms of rehabilitation’ linked to an article of the same title that was later published in Legal and Criminological Psychology (you can still find the draft version on the Useful Resources page). 

In recent months, I’ve been puzzling a little over whether or not I missed out a fifth form of rehabilitation… The four forms were legal, social, psychological and moral; the fifth one might be ‘natural’. Though that’s a word that always makes me uncomfortable, I think in some respects we can think of desistance as ‘natural rehabilitation’. Some people draw a distinction between natural or spontaneous desistance and ‘assisted desistance’; the former implies aging out or growing out of crime; the latter implies that the person is somehow helped out of crime. I think that perhaps ‘natural rehabilitation’ — meaning the human process of changing, restoring and reintegrating (as opposed to whatever we might do by way of intervention to try to support, compel or engineer change) — is another way of referring to desistance.

I’ve given a talk a couple of times in the last month (in Adelaide at Manchester) trying to explain how these five forms of rehabilitation need to be disentangled, if only so that we can then examine their interdependencies — and I’ve used clips from ‘The Road from Crime’ to illustrate these connections. The folks at the University of Manchester were kind enough to record the talk I gave there on Wednesday. If you’re interested, you can download it here:  https://stream.manchester.ac.uk/Play.aspx?VideoId=12039

Very interested to hear people’s views.

Travelling Desistance Hucksters and the Hawthorne Effect

I have had a lot of interesting travels lately. I don’t usually blog or tweet about such things (what could be duller than reading others’ travelogues? “I’m off to Wolverhampton next week” etc) but thought I would make an exception this time because there is a point to it.

A few days ago, I was lucky enough to be asked to speak at the St. Giles Trust’s 50th Annual General Meeting. It was shocking how many of the Trust’s staff and managers were familiar with and motivated by the desistance literature. As several told me, if desistance is the theory, the St. Giles Trust (with its commitment to hiring ex-prisoner resettlement mentors) is very much the practice. I left hugely impressed with all they are doing but especially with the remarkably upbeat vibe.

Just a few days before that meeting, I spoke at a very interesting workshop sponsored by NOMS’s Correctional Services Advice and Accreditation Panel (CSAAP) titled “Unifying ‘What Works’ and ‘Desistance’ Perspectives.” Despite the promise of this title, organisers occasionally slipped and referred to the day as the “What Works versus Desistance” panel, and I felt more than a little outnumbered with some of the world’s most renowned and articulate advocates of ‘what works’ there to explain and defend that body of research, which is often framed as being in conflict with a ‘desistance’ approach.

Still, I was very pleasantly surprised how much common ground was really uncovered. Although there was plenty of criticism of desistance work, little of this had to do with the research itself outside of the usual reminder that desistance research is “correlational not causal” and the familiar question of “but how do you know that they are really desisting?” The biggest gripe that my other panellists seemed to have was the suggestion that desistance research represented a new ‘paradigm’ (apparently a misuse of this word – although neither I nor any of the NOMS staff in the audience particularly care whether desistance was called a ‘paradigm’ or a ‘perspective’ or a ‘pumpernickel pie’ for that matter).

The only criticism that still rings in my ears a week later was an insinuation, repeated a couple times, that there was something evangelical or perhaps huckster-ish about the desistance knowledge exchange work we have discussed so proudly with this blog. One of the biggest laughs at my expense at the conference was a line about me “jetting all over the world, promoting your film, getting people all excited” about this desistance stuff. That one hurt, I have to say. As an American (by birth) and the son of a master salesman, hucksterism is very literally in my blood, so I am sensitive to the insinuation.

Still, it is rather ironic. As I pointed out in my own talk, unlike many rehabilitation advocates, we in the desistance camp literally have nothing to sell. There is no “Desistance-Brand Treatment Programme”, there’s no “Desistance Readiness Assessment Instrument” for profiling risk, there’s no “Desistance-Based Intervention Assessment Instrument” to determine if your programme is adhering to the desistance principles. Moreover, if anyone tries to sell you any of those things and calls them ‘desistance’, they should basically be ignored. As far as I know, none of us have ever made a dime on desistance — and for good reason: it is awfully hard to copyright and market an organic process that belongs to the desister and not to any group of experts.

As for ‘jet-setting’… “Easy Jet setting” is more like it. I can’t speak for my colleagues Fergus, Claire or Stephen, but I absolutely love having the opportunity to meet fascinating groups like the St. Giles Trust and learn about the work they are doing. But I truly hate budget airline travel. I hate being away from my family, my work, my students. And, ironic as it may be for someone who took a job as a ‘lecturer’, I still have a terrible fear of speaking in public.

So, why do we do it? And, I mean ‘we’ here (In 20 years, I have only met one academic who gives more talks to professional groups in criminal justice than I do, and that is Fergus!) What motivates us? For me, the answer is simple: People keep asking. There appears to be a real hunger, a real interest in “The Road from Crime” and learning about desistance research more generally, and the invitations have just rolled in over the past year. And, as long as groups keep asking, we keep saying yes.

Now, some of my fellow panellists were openly concerned about this. They worried that we were getting folks overly excited when in fact we were peddling empty dreams without sufficient research evidence. Then, it occurred to me, that if the main thing we are generating is enthusiasm, then perhaps there is nothing empty about what we are doing at all. After all, the best and most rigorous of the scientific ‘what works’ research consistently shows that the most motivated, passionate staff typically produce the best results (results that are very difficult to repeat once an intervention practice becomes routinized — in what is known as a Hawthorne Effect). It may be that the wave of interest in desistance research is just that, a flash in the pan, a momentary excitement that will soon dissipate only to be replaced by the next big thing. Yet, rehabilitation work is extremely difficult and layered with disappointment and heartbreak. Those of us in this field need the occasional injection of hope and passion to do this work well. So, if all we desistance hucksters have to ‘sell’ is enthusiasm — and we are basically giving that away for free (although sometimes hosts will remember to compensate us for our travel costs) — then I say, good for us. We may even be doing “what works” after all.

I’ve got more to say, but I’ve got to run. I’m up at the crack of dawn Monday to deliver a keynote at the Surrey and Sussex Probation Trust Annual Meeting.

Researchers on top and their useless evidence!

I recently published a guest blog post for the Alliance for Useful Evidence, where I mentioned the Discovering Desistance project as a good example of research-practitioner-service user engagement.   Thought some of you who follow this blog might be interested.

Claire Lightowler

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At an event today about community empowerment in Scotland someone approached me to discuss his less than empowering experience of research.  He had been contacted by a group of, in his words, “no doubt eminent academics”, who had told him they had just been awarded funding to research his community and were seeking to meet him to find out about his experience of community ownership. There had been no prior engagement, no discussion with the community about what research they would like, and the research funders clearly hadn’t seriously considered the level of engagement between researched and researchers.  The irony of all this when the topic of research is community ownership didn’t escape either of us!

Now, lets hope that despite this inauspicious start, the evidence emerging from this process will eventually be useful to the community being studied and also that wider lessons are shared for others to reflect and learn.  However, it’s a helpful reminder of one reason (there are others) why useless evidence is produced.

In this example, there is a strong likelihood that the people being researched will feel disconnected from the research process, they won’t necessarily think the questions being asked are the ‘right’ ones, will have no ownership over the findings emerging, may not know what the research means to them or how to actually use it.  So the quality of the research is likely to be poorer and the potential for it to be useful to policy, practice and people outside academia likely to be less than if there had been greater engagement and co-operation at an earlier stage.

As luck would have it only last week a colleague, Cathy Sharp (from Research for Real), shared with me a book chapter by John Heron and Peter Reason on this very topic – “The practice of co-operative inquiry: Research with rather than on people”.  For them, and for me too, “good research is research conducted with people rather than on people” (Heron and Reason, 2001: 179).  Not a bad starting point of principle for the creation of useful evidence.

How people translate this principle will differ. For some this may lead them to think about action research or co-operative inquiry approaches (for a useful exploration of what this is see the chapter referred to above or this storyboard). For others it may start with some relatively basic changes to their research approach.  For instance, last night my partner, who works as an academic, was asking me how he could ensure his research project about child protection and joint working across housing and social services was really “with people”.  When I suggested he spoke to housing and social work practitioners about the issues they faced before he developed a potential research question, he genuinely hadn’t considered this. “Could I talk to them at this stage?” he asked, immediately relieved of the pressure of coming up with a research question in isolation from this engagement.  A really simple suggestion, but potentially transformative in terms of ensuring useful evidence emerges.

Of course, sometimes this practitioner-research monologue is not enough either! After all, we are often focusing on people and their lives, and so a more appropriate aspiration might be to support genuine dialogue between a much wider group of stakeholders.  This is one of the aspirations of a project I’m involved in at the moment which aims to share knowledge about how and why people stop offending from crime, and to recommend changes in policy and practice to better support people to stop offending (a process known as desistance).  In this project knowledge is shared and co-created between people who have offended, families and supporters of people who have offended, academics, policymakers, managers, practitioners, employers and service providers.  The project activities have included the production of a documentary film (called ‘The road from crime‘), the creation of a blog site and facilitated workshops where this group of stakeholders co-produce clear recommendations about how to improve processes, policies and practice to better support desistance from crime.

I’m really struck here by the parallels between the ownership of research (agendas, questions and data) and the issues around community ownership of physical assets I’ve just been involved in discussing (and where this post started).  One of the parallels is nicely summed up by one of the panel experts at the community empowerment event (Milind Kolhatkar, from Edinburgh voluntary organisation’s council) who argued that communities need:

“Experts on tap rather than experts on top”

So, to all of us involved in producing research can we stop thinking of ourselves as experts on high who know it all and need to know it all?

Obviously, I’m simplifying things for effect here: there are many researchers who do not fit this overly simplified caricature and there are a range of issues and difficulties associated with the approach I’m advocating.  However, as a research community, perhaps there is value in reflecting on what research production would look like if there was greater acknowledgement of the different forms of expertise other people can bring to the creation of research, and so really free researchers from being the experts on top. Could this reflection help us to focus on making our research expertise available “on tap”, to help people understand the issues they face and the world in which they live, and to help us all collectively learn how to change and improve.

Not only will the evidence we produce be more useful as a result, but it is highly likely that it will be more accurate, our theories will be better informed, our publications of higher quality and our endeavours could just also be better recognised by (some) research funders too.  It’s not an either or – useful evidence is better evidence!

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Claire Lightowler is programme manager of Evidence-informed practice at IRISS (Institute for Research and Innovation in Social Services).

IRISS promotes positive outcomes for people supported by social services in Scotland by enhancing the capacity and capability of social service stakeholders to access and make use of knowledge and evidence for service innovation and improvement.

You can contact Claire at claire.lightowler@iriss.org.uk or find out more about IRISS at www.iriss.org.uk.

References

Heron, J. and Reason, P. (2001) ‘The Practice of Co-operative Inquiry: Research with rather than on people ‘ in P. Reason & H. Bradbury (Eds.), Handbook of Action Research: Participative Inquiry and Practice (pp. 179-188). London: Sage 2001.  Download here – http://www.peterreason.eu/Papers_list.html

IRISS (2012) How action research can help deliver better services: Creative Storyboard,

http://www.iriss.org.uk/resources/how-action-research-can-help-deliver-better-services-video

Discovering desistance blog, https://blogs.iriss.org.uk/discoveringdesistance/

The road from crime film (2012) http://www.iriss.org.uk/resources/the-road-from-crime