This is the text of my closing plenary address at the British Criminology Conference at Sheffield Hallam University on 8^th July 2017.

Introduction

I want to thank the conference organisers for inviting me to talk to you today; I’ve been at several BSC conferences over the years – and once endured the joys and pains of organising one – so I very much appreciate their efforts and their hospitality. This one has been a lot of fun – and full of stimulation. I haven’t missed a session and I haven’t been at a disappointing one, and that’s a first. It feels as if British criminology is at an important moment and it looks like, for once in my life, I might get the last word. So, no pressure then.

Before I start, I also want to say how delighted I am to find myself following Beth. Indeed, when I was one of her PhD supervisors, I spent a lot of my time, trying to keep up with her. It’s not easy. She has remarkable reserves of energy, intellect and commitment – to which you have just borne witness. I’m very proud to have played even a tiny part in supporting her development. And, in similar vein, I want to take the opportunity to acknowledge and thank my other colleagues – past and present — at the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research and in Scottish criminology more generally. I say ‘Scottish’, but as I prepared this talk, I realise that, even if I limit myself just to SCCJR’s Glasgow branch,

I’m going to be drawing today on recent conversations with colleagues at all career stages and from places including Chile, England, Ireland, the Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, Sweden and the USA. That’s Scottish criminology for you; nothing if not cosmopolitan.

Critiques of Desistance

I’ll start where Beth [Weaver] left off — with desistance theory and research, but, with this audience, I’m going to assume a degree of familiarity with the literature and skip the usual discussions of definitions and explanations. I want to jump straight into emerging critiques of desistance research, before looking beyond desistance and towards dystopia and utopia. So, buckle up your belts…

Recently, Pat Carlen – perhaps surprisingly — invited me to contribute a chapter on desistance to her co-edited collection with Leandro Ayres Franca on ‘Alternative Criminologies’. The book has just been published in Portuguese [and now, the English version is out: see https://www.routledge.com/Alternative-Criminologies/Carlen-Ayres-Franca/p/book/9781138067431].

Hannah Graham (who is another Scottish criminologist – though this time from Tasmania) kindly agreed to write this chapter with me; and we agreed that it would be appropriate in a collection of this sort to try to engage constructively with critical criminological perspectives on desistance. Another Scottish colleague, Alejandro, this time from Spain, would say that what we try to do in that chapter is to enter into a dialogue rather than a debate.

Some critics have begun to suggest that desistance scholars offer a reductionist account of crime and its cessation; one which de-contextualises offending behaviour and, worse, responsibilises individuals for their own desistance and reintegration. In essence, desistance research is seen by some as being ‘too agentic’ — too heavily predicated on individualistic notions of rational actors exercising human agency. Eileen Baldry and Phil Scraton are among the esteemed and respected colleagues who have made these points. To de-contextualise and de-politicise both crime and criminalisation is to belie their construction in and through an unjust social order; thus neglecting and perpetuating the inequalities that drive social injustice.

Hannah and I agree that there are aspects of and applications of desistance research that, if emphasised to the exclusion of other things, risk co-optation with responsibilising and reductionist approaches to punishment and rehabilitation. As desistance scholars, we are painfully aware of the increasingly repetitious use of the catch-cry ‘supporting desistance’, often as though this can be delimited to a set of prescriptions for how criminal justice workers can better support individuals to change or secure their own recovery, rather than looking beyond the individual both for the causes and the solutions of crime and criminalisation related problems.

The ‘too individualistic/too agentic’ critique does usefully highlight a tendency within desistance research to focus on individuals as the primary ‘unit of analysis’, although as Beth’s work demonstrates, there are desistance researchers taking different approaches. That said, there are some good reasons for focusing on the experiences of individuals. Any body of research which decentres or discounts the lived experiences of people in criminal justice processes, while making claims about them – even on their behalf — would lack legitimacy, both methodologically and politically. Instead, the question is how and by whom individual, relational and collective experiences are best to be gathered, represented, understood and explained, with critical emphasis on the reciprocal influences of structure and agency.

In fact, despite the criticisms I have just mentioned, very few desistance scholars advocate rational choice theorisations of desistance. Indeed, I think it’s fair to say that most (in the UK at least) routinely reject and challenge reductionist and responsibilising approaches to rehabilitation (as should be obvious from Beth’s talk); that is often one of the reasons why we got into desistance research in the first place. In the UK, desistance research gained momentum as a counter-narrative to ‘what works’ research and related approaches to authoritarian, correctional rehabilitation. Desistance scholars have put considerable intellectual effort into developing sophisticated analyses of the relational, institutional and social contexts of desistance – Stephen Farrall’s work is an excellent example. In this sort of work, understandings of changes in people’s offending are not divorced from but rather linked to changes in life chances and social conditions. Even those commonly identified as identity theorists and sometimes accused of offering accounts that are supposedly ‘too agentic’, like Shadd Maruna or Peggy Giordano, in fact tend to take a social interactionist approach; hence, for example, the importance for Shadd of both labelling and de-labelling processes.

Some feminist critical criminologists have challenged the validity and utility of desistance scholarship on the grounds of its capacity to recognise and respond to diversity and discrimination. Their criticisms centre on the argument that desistance scholarship has ignored gendered differences in processes of crime, criminalisation and desistance from crime – and the patriarchal contexts of these processes. Carlton and Baldry (2013) explain their abolitionist stance in rejecting liberal-reformist discourses of women’s ‘pathways’ in terms of imprisonment and desistance as follows:

Desistance, however, does not escape the criticism we bring to other criminal justice policies and programmes – that they are male centric. All the original desistance studies were conducted with men in the United States and the United Kingdom, so that the framework was built around men’s experiences. At its heart, the desistance approach is male centric, individualistic and ignores the interlocking structural contexts of class, race and gender (Carlton and Baldry, 2013: 65).

Pollack (2012: 107) similarly sees liberal reformist gender-responsive ‘pathways’ approaches as complicit in the ‘hegemonic logic’ of correctionalism which imposes expert notions upon… criminalised women.’ Pollack (2012) argues this is a form of ‘epistemic violence’ which subjugates women’s narratives and identities, and de-politicises the social-structural roots of crime as a social problem using the ideological tools of evidence-based practices to compel these women’s reform, as if they cannot know themselves what they want and need.

While these are important challenges for desistance scholars, I think there are some inaccuracies in these critiques, which perhaps reflect a lack of serious or sustained engagement with the desistance literature and the debates within it. It is true – and it is both important and problematic – that most desistance research, like most criminology, started with and has privileged men’s experiences. But, in contrast to the critics’ claims, the international literature on desistance increasingly highlights issues of diversity, especially in relation to the gendered and racialised structural contexts of crime, criminalisation and desistance. Indeed, even a cursory reading of some of the key desistance studies reveals the inclusion of girls and women as research participants (see Liebrich, 1993; Graham and Bowling, 1995; Maruna, 2001; Giordano et al., 2002; Blokland and Nieuwbeerta, 2005; Smith and McVie, 2003; McAra and McVie, 2009; Farrall, 2002; Farrall and Calverley, 2006; Farrall et al., 2014).

And, also contrary to these critics’ claims, there has in fact been a proliferation of scholarship on gender in critically understanding both desistance and re/integration (for example, Sommers, Baskin and Fagan, 1994; Uggen and Kruttschnitt, 1998; McIvor, Murray and Jamieson, 2004; Rumgay, 2004; Leverentz, 2006, 2014; King et al., 2007; Søgaard et al., 2015).

Others, have used intersectionality, critical race and post-colonial theories to explore relationships between ethnicity, racialisation and desistance (for example, Calverley, 2013; Glynn 2013, 2015), including in relation to indigenous people’s experience of criminal justice in Canada (Deane, Bracken and Morrissette, 2007) and Australia (Marchetti and Daly, 2016; Halsey and Deegan, 2016).

More generally – and somewhat ironically — the critics sometimes write as if desistance is a singular approach – as opposed to a body of work full of internal conflict. Worse still, they confuse desistance theories and research with a particular criminal justice policy or programme of reform. Policies and programmes can be desistance-oriented in that they can be (1) pointed to that purpose and/or (2) informed by desistance theories and research. However, most desistance scholars think of desistance as a process that belongs to the people going through it, irrespective of which criminal justice professional(s) they interact with or which sanction is imposed upon them, if any. To say this, however, is not to support individualisation and responsibilisation. Indeed, it is intended to hold states, civil societies, justice systems and practices to account for their roles in supporting or frustrating, allowing or denying these processes – both in material and in symbolic terms. It is to these responsibilities that I now want to turn.

Beyond Desistance?

The critiques that I have just mentioned – whatever their limitations — represent a useful challenge to aspects of desistance research and of its criminal justice applications. However, I think that desistance research itself may have begun to do a better job of exposing its own limitations and contradictions, initially by beginning to confront the question of what, if anything, lies beyond desistance from crime? If, as is often argued, desistance is a process of development, what is it supposed to lead to? What kind of human flourishing lies beyond desistance from crime?

We need to look no further than this city to grasp the importance of these questions; the Sheffield Desistance Study highlights them in a particularly bleak and powerful way. Tony Bottoms (2013) has argued that, in that study, some people desisted through a form of extreme ‘situational self-binding’ which amounts effectively to the self-imposed incarceration of social isolation. Although Bottoms (2013) notes that this was a rare phenomenon in the Sheffield study, evidence from other studies suggests that it is not so unusual for those whose desistance processes lack personal and social support.

Adam Calverley’s (2009) exploration of ethnicity and desistance, for example, suggests that Black and Dual Heritage men in one London borough faced the greatest structural and cultural obstacles to desistance — and that they too tended to desist through self-isolation.

Two recent Scottish studies of very different populations have produced even clearer accounts of what we might perhaps call ‘dystopian desistance’. Marguerite Schinkel is a Scottish criminologist from the Netherlands, Her study focussed on people who were serving or had served long prison sentences. Briege Nugent is a Scottish criminologist from the north of Ireland. Her study of marginalised young people exiting an intensive support service — also found common ‘pains of desistance’ linked to social isolation and the failure to secure work, connection and belonging. These findings certainly paint a depressing and dystopian picture of life after desistance, at least for some people. In a sense, they expose the taken-for-grantedness of the assumption that ending offending is a ‘good’ outcome. Not offending may be a good outcome in the sense that it means less harm for society and for potential victims, but if it entails increases in the suffering of the person desisting (and perhaps of those closest to her or him) then, even on a cold utilitarian logic, the value of this outcome remains uncertain.

Sarah Anderson’s ongoing doctoral research at Glasgow makes an important and novel contribution to this line of argument. Her PhD explores the life histories of men who have experienced repeated trauma, offending and criminalisation and who are struggling to make some kind of recovery. Sarah’s painstaking analysis is beginning to show how the structural and symbolic violence of repeated criminalisation contributes to a cumulative traumatisation which undermines their fragile efforts to desist and, more generally, to build better lives for themselves and those they care most about. And in relation to these loved ones, other important work in Scotland by Cara Jardine, Rebecca Foster and Kirsty Deacon has exposed and is exposing how this structural and symbolic violence reverberates in their lives too.

Ultimately, this leads Sarah to ask whether desistance from crime is really the central issue at stake in these narratives – it is certainly not central to the way many of the men relate their stories. Their struggles are as much struggles for recovery from criminalisation and penalisation as struggles to stop offending. For others – despite histories of offending and criminalisation — both are marginal issues in their day-to-day fight for survival. There may well be things about these men themselves – long-established habits and patterns of thought and behaviour – that they need and want to change; but what they need most is change in long established habits and patterns of criminal justice thought and behaviour; and, perhaps even more importantly, change in the ways that we think and behave as a society.

For me, this is the most significant current challenge to and critique of desistance research – and it emerges from within it, from honestly following the data where it leads, and from examining the process as it is related by people living it. The irremediable problem with talking about desistance is that it accepts offending as the main issue at stake; sometimes forgetting those lessons from Criminology 101 about the way that social structures shape who and what gets criminalised – and in whose interests. I think I am perhaps still enough of a ‘left realist’ to accept that offending is an important issue and that striving to reduce it is a good thing. But it seems that desistance research is itself telling us that the real problems are – fittingly for a conference about ‘Forging Social Justice’, hosted in a post-industrial city – problems of social inequality and social injustice as refracted and amplified through criminalisation and penalisation. In other words, it seems that it is we – the criminalisers, the penalisers, the punishers, the excluders – that need to desist. But how?

Rethinking Rehabilitation

How are we to be supported in our desistance; how are we to be rehabilitated? Critical criminologists have also – again quite rightly – challenged criminology’s and criminal justice’s pre-occupation with these ‘re-words’.

Re-formation. Re-habilitation. Re-integration. Re-settlement. Re-entry. In French, Re-insertion. In German, Re-socialisation. The common arguments are, first, that these words spring from the (philosophically) liberal assumption that there is a just order in which the ‘offender’ was once habilitated, integrated and settled and, secondly, by implication, that the challenge is replacing him or her in that social order; making him or her fit back in. To put this more figuratively – we focus on reshaping the ‘offender’ and/or on reshaping the gap, but we don’t see the bigger picture of the structures that shape both the square peg and the round hole.

A third – and again related — critique – which we’ve been discussing of late in the SCCJR – concerns the ways in which these terms themselves represent a form of symbolic domination through language; one which has material consequences for those who are its objects. This is not their language or the language of their experiences; it is the self-justifying rhetoric of the system that ensnares them.

How might we respond? We could abandon these terms – but I think that risks both surrendering these terms to others within the criminal justice system and marginalising ourselves in public dialogue and debate. My preference – and my approach – has been to interrogate and seek to redefine these terms; to challenge not the words themselves but the ways in which they are understood and employed. Indeed, drawing on desistance research, I have argued that we need to develop models, policies and practices that attend not so much to ‘correctional’ understandings of rehabilitation aimed at individual transformation, as to mutual moral reparation, to judicial rehabilitation linked to restored civil rights and status, and to social integration too.

As well as reframing the meanings of these terms, a second response to the problem of symbolic domination may be – as already suggested – to flip the lens and apply these terms to the power-holders and the privileged – or better still, to all of us. To borrow from one of John Braithwaite’s memorable criminological contributions – but maybe applying it more to Valerie Braithwaite’s usual targets – a process of reintegrative shaming might be overdue for institutions, systems, practices and people who are the perpetrators of the injustices that uneven criminalisation and penalisation and enduring exclusion exacerbates. Perhaps we all need to confronted and shamed by our differing degrees of complicity in and responsibility for these systemic ‘crimes’, before we can be dissociated from our offences and reintegrated.

To teach us about that process, I look to the work of another colleague at the University of Glasgow – Professor Alison Phipps, holder of a recently established UNESCO Chair in Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts. Alison is what she calls a new Scot, having migrated from England herself. Her conception of refugee integration in avowedly ‘multilateral’; I cannot integrate you and you cannot integrate me. A guest does not integrate a host, nor a host a guest. We integrate together or not at all; as Beth might put it, and as her work so beautifully demonstrates, we have to accept, embody and practice mutual responsibility for creating community through solidarity and subsidiarity. In this sense, my rehabilitation is your rehabilitation and yours is mine. Either we figure out how to live together or we live apart.

When I shared this talk with Hannah a few days ago, she pointed me to this quote from Zygmunt Bauman, offered during one of his last interviews at age 90 last year:

“Divisions and conflicts between people are as old as humanity. There was always an intermixing process of integration and separation. Separation was always the guiding instrument of the integrating effort. If you wanted to integrate people, you have to point to their joint enemy, joint other… The stranger who is against ourselves that we need to watch and be vigilant and to defend ourselves [against]. For the first time we are in a situation where we have to commit to the next step on the road to integration without separation. The next step is a step towards people who are in a cosmopolitan situation. There are no remaining enemies against whom we will integrate. It’s a new situation that is unpracticed and untested so far. That’s what makes our present moment… on the one side, so terrifying, and on the other, so exciting.” [Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.za/koketso-marishane/a-tribute-to-eus-greatest-scholar-professor-zygmunt-bauman_a_21714411/]

How is this work of integration without separation to be done? It is no accident that Alison Phipps’ academic background is in anthropology and linguistics as well as education; and it is no accident that she has come to recognise the value of the arts as common languages through which integration is enabled, practised and represented.

In the abstract that I provided months ago and which, inconveniently, made its way into the conference programme, I promised at this point to discuss a new project called ‘Distant Voices: Coming Home’, recently funded by the ESRC and AHRC – but I fear that time will defeat me if I allow myself start to talk about this exciting partnership with Vox Liminis (a third sector organisation) and with Jo Collinson Scott (a musicologist from the University of the West of Scotland) and Oliver Escobar (a political scientist from the University of Edinburgh). Suffice it to say that this 3-year project, which has just begun, seeks to blur the boundaries between creative practice, community development, research and knowledge exchange. Its focus is on re/integration, but not the reintegration of individuals who have been punished; rather we aim to explore and influence whether, how and to what extent, a wide range of different actors – ourselves included – can build or rebuild community both during and after state punishment.

Conclusion

 As I said earlier, Carlen and Franca’s collection is concerned with ‘Alternatives Criminologies’. In a conference on Forging Social Justice, it seems fitting that I finish in this utopian vein. At the end of his challenging talk yesterday, Simon Winlow did ask us for a bit of criminological vision yesterday. This is all I’ve got so far.

Lately, both in Scottish sociology (for example in the work of another Glasgow colleague, Matt Dawson) and in Scottish criminology (in the work of Lynne Copson, Margaret Malloch and Bill Munro), there has been a resurgence of interest in utopia not just as critique but also as method. The work of Ruth Levitas has been one important inspiration in these debates. Levitas defines utopia as ‘the expression of the desire for a better way of being or of living’ (Levitas 2013: xii). She argues that visions of utopias can be developed as compensation for an unjust status quo (as in some religious utopias); as critique of how things are (by contrast with how they might be); and as more or less clearly articulated programmes of change (Levitas, 2000; see Dawson, 2016). Levitas’ (2013) work on utopia also argues the need for an archaeology — one that excavates the vision of the good society implicit in any given utopia; for an ontology — one that explores the utopia’s assumptions about human nature; and for an architecture of how the utopia is to be built in practice.

In the assessment that Hannah and I offer in our book chapter, despite the variety of views it encompasses, research on desistance and rehabilitation often shares a common implicit ontology; it asserts and it evidences the positive potential of human subjects and sees them as fundamentally social beings that are capable of growth and development, in the right circumstances. As such it undermines criminal justice responses (and social attitudes) that seek to define and to ‘other’ people with reference to their offending behaviour.

To a certain extent, desistance research and rehabilitation research have also offered ‘architectures’ of reform. But these designs, as I have said, vary greatly and are highly disputed both within and between the two literatures; they are even more disparate in the sometimes diverse and contradictory programmes of policy practice reform they have spawned. For some, like Beth and me, I think, the architecture of desistance has arguably moved beyond (and even away from) a focus on criminal justice policy and practice reform to include the development of a much more expansive — but still very young and under-developed — social movement.

What desistance and rehabilitation theories both perhaps lack, however, is a well-developed ‘archaeology’. So long as they begin with the assumed problems of offending and of ending offending rather than with what lies before, behind and beyond these problems and their construction, they will lack a well-articulated vision of the good society. But having said that, as I hope this session has illustrated, by exploring how people build better lives together, desistance research, like much of criminology, eventually forces us — through careful theoretical, empirical and normative work — to explore how we can build better communities and better societies. Increasingly, it makes clear that these questions cannot, should not and must not be separated.

And that’s the challenge, I think for contemporary criminology. It’s not just that we have to escape an uncritical focus on a narrow range of currently criminalized social harms, as the zemiologists argue. It is also that we need, I think, to offer much more than critique; we need to contribute constructively to imagining the architecture of a just social order. That may be a job for Simon Winlow’s radical economists and for political philosophers but, as criminologists, perhaps our unique contribution can be to articulate how a just social order might respond to wrongdoing (of all sorts) in ways that provide more than mere harm reduction. We need to offer responses that create and are constitutive of the conditions under which individual and collective human flourishing are made more possible, rather than constituting and exacerbating the conditions under which many people, families, groups, communities and societies suffer and decay.

We need a manifesto for the many, not the few, as someone said recently.

In his second guest post, Kris McPherson reflects further on his own experiences of rehabilitation through education, raising important questions not just about personal development in prison but also about prison regimes and social attitudes.

The evolution of behavioural and attitudinal reform is different for every person who embarks upon the desistance journey. However, a commonality appears to be that those who have the greatest success in sustaining desistance are people who utilise something termed a ‘hook-for-change’ (Giordano et al., 2002, cited in McNeill and Weaver, 2010). Succinctly, a ‘hook-for-change’ functions as a catalyst that initiates the desistance process for people who have previously been involved in offending behaviour. It is a foundation for which successful desistance is built.

My first ‘hook-for-change’ was academic education.

Fortunately, I have always been very captivated and intrigued by various forms of knowledge throughout my life. As a young boy, I voraciously read about subjects of all kinds. I studied maps, atlases and foreign language books to quench my insatiable thirst for insights into distant lands. I can name just about any capital/major city from the top of my head as well as being able to instantaneously point to places on a map as a result of poring over these maps and atlases. I used to sit and read the dictionary in class, looking for obscure words I hadn’t heard of before.

Knowledge has always been important to me.

I continued to purchase books and visit the local library during my ‘offending years’, which some thought peculiar for a person who behaved like I did (perhaps revealing their own stereotypical biases vis-à-vis the idiosyncrasies of those who offend). The irony is that people have persistently told me throughout my life that I am intelligent but ‘never used it for the right reasons’ (by which I assume they mean ‘legal reasons’). In fact, my nearest library was located within the stomping ground of a rival gang and yet I risked my physical safety in order to feed my over-active and deeply analytical brain. I am unsure whether this says something about my recklessness or more about my insatiable desire for knowledge. I also ended up forming a relationship with a girl from this same area, further complicating matters.

My Dad died suddenly as I was about to turn fourteen, resulting in me becoming deeply immersed in offending behaviour. I never spoke of his death with anyone (even family members) and now wonder if my offending behaviour was my own way of speaking about it? In other words, I suspect that the suppressed, unexpressed rage and emotional damage in relation to my Dad’s death mutated into a pathology that found expression through criminal acts. The commission of criminal actions achieved applause and reverence from my peers, which only fed my desire to appear powerful and indestructible when, in reality, I was the complete opposite – powerless and concealing a fractured heart and a psychically damaged soul. Looking back in reflection, I wonder if my raison d’être at that time (gang-focused offending and reputation building) was fuelled by the projection of my subconscious, latent rage and anguish vis-à-vis my Dad’s death on to those people from rival areas who conducted themselves in a fashion similar to myself?

The beauty of hindsight… and insight.

Sadly, the degree of my criminality mushroomed to the extent that I was incarcerated for four years at the age of fifteen. My behaviour, while contained within the institutional setting, still caused concern as I continued to dig a deeper hole for myself. The way I saw it back then was that I may have been the one digging the hole but the culture around me and my limited life chances handed me the shovel. As you can imagine, I did not pursue formal education during this spell in custody but still did much reading.

I was still wading through the turbid sludge of vengeful thinking and criminality.

Upon release, I picked up where I had left off in the community vis-à-vis criminality. However, I noticed that my peers were even more deferential towards me and I relished this at the time. It was as though I had returned from the moon or a war in some far off nation, held up by my peer group as an example for others to replicate. This may illustrate ways in which some people in lower-income neighbourhoods like mine function view such behaviour. By the time I received my current prison term at the age of twenty-one, I knew I had to do something before I ended up with a life sentence or worse.

That is where my hook-for-change (education) came in.

As I was now in an adult prison, I was in a better position to pursue higher education and this is exactly what I did. The minute I landed in HMP Shotts, I asked the learning centre staff what I had to do to gain acceptance for the Open University. After passing the prerequisite courses, I was accepted to do a degree and so began my odyssey of deep, analytical reflection, questioning and critical analysis of not only who I was then but who I wanted to be and where I wanted my life to go in the future. As the desistance literature explains (see: McNeill and Weaver, 2010; McNeill, 2014, for examples), my identity gradually shifted and I ceased to see myself as a serious criminal. Instead, I viewed myself as a serious student and (one day) an aspiring academic with something to contribute to society, utilising academia as the vehicle within which to realise this.

My academic addiction grew exponentially like some tropical virus and my daily reading material went from tales of drug lords and Mafia kingpins to classical literature (Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is probably my favourite!), academic analyses of political leaders and the political mechanisms of foreign nations. I wrote a play and novel (crime-fiction) which, although not published yet, received a lot of praise from teachers and academics alike.

I continued my fascination for languages. I actually bought my first Italian dictionary at the age of twelve and sought to expand my knowledge of the language now that I had enough time to do so. I mastered the Cyrillic/Russian alphabet in two days but the Arabic alphabet took me around eight months to learn. I saw these advanced, enigmatic languages as a challenge and was fascinated by their unusual characters and symbols. However, my knowledge of Russian and Arabic are nowhere near my level of Italian.

I hope one day this will change.

I do feel fortunate that I have been able to use my prison time to study in this manner. While academic education in prison contributed to my identity shift, in other prison systems people are not so fortunate as to have their education paid for by the authorities. Wacquant (2002) cites how the American prison system prohibited inmates from pursuing academic studies (through Pell Grants subsidies) regardless of the fact that it has been proven to reduce recidivism and enhance prison stability. The reason for discontinuing higher education in American prisons was cited as the ‘illegitimate draining of public finances’ (Wacquant, 2002, p.22).

If higher education reduces recidivism, maintains prison stability and, in my own personal experience, precipitates an identity shift from ‘offender’ to (aspiring) ‘scholar’ then why withdraw funding? How could the education of uneducated people be called ‘illegitimate?’ Surely the ‘richest superpower on earth’ can afford to educate willing inmates? Uncle Sam’s message to American prisoners seems to be “I won’t invest in your ‘hook-for-change!’”

Regardless of the social impact in the future.

Now that I have only just completed my criminology degree, I am fortunate enough to have developed an extreme interest in reading academic research papers (I literally have stacks of them in my cell). These are the skills I hope to use as another ‘hook-for-change’ to extract myself from the “fissures and ditches” of what Wacquant (2010a, p.199) called the “organizational mesh of the dualizing metropolis”.

According to Wacquant (2010a, p.199), “Welfare revamped as workfare and the prison stripped of its rehabilitative pretension now form a single organizational mesh flung at the same clientele mired in the fissures and ditches of the dualizing metropolis. They work jointly to invisibilize problem populations – by forcing them off the public aid rolls, on the one hand, and holding them under lock, on the other – and eventually push them into the peripheral sectors of the booming secondary labor market”.

Perhaps this is a major hindrance to desistance?

It is clear that people like myself who choose desistance do have a major role to play. But I cannot do it all on my own. As McNeill and Weaver (2010) argue, those who commit to desistance can only do so much by themselves. Sooner or later, society has to step up to the plate and absorb people back into the fold of daily life through employment and other forms of social participation in order for them to transcend desistance to the extent that it is not a matter of simple desistance but true reformation.

At what point does desistance become a part of you?

While McNeill and Schinkel (2015) state that it is impossible to ascertain the moment from which any behaviour ceases permanently, one wonders whether we can use Maruna and Farrall’s (2004) ideas of ‘primary desistance’ and ‘secondary desistance’ (cited in McNeill and Schinkel, 2015) to understand the period from which offending behaviour ceases and desists. According to Maruna and Farrall (2004), primary desistance refers to a shift in the idiosyncratic pattern while secondary desistance alludes to a transformation in identity (cited in McNeill and Schinkel, 2015). Furthermore, McNeill and Schinkel (2015) put forward the notion of ‘tertiary desistance’, which involves the person’s sense of belonging within a ‘moral, social and political society’.

From a personal viewpoint, this sounds completely logical.

Furthermore, McNeill and Weaver (2010) postulate a three-step process in the desistance journey which appears to parallel the primary, secondary and tertiary steps. These include the motivation to change, the capacity to reinforce change and the opportunities to realise transformation. The first two highlight a certain degree of human agency although may be initiated by external dynamics. The third element stresses the importance of society’s role in supporting the inclusion of people who have offended. At the present time, one could argue that potential desisters are expected to conform to societal norms and regulations without participation or realisation of all the society can offer to those seeking personal, moral, social or political growth.

But how can the neoliberal ‘Leviathan’ (Wacquant, 2010a, p.201) expect the marginalised and disenfranchised people caught up in the carceral/welfare nexus to conform to the “obligations of citizenship” without conferring upon them the “rights of citizenship?” How do we initiate the ‘responsibilisation’ of those in power to accept their own role, as McNeill (2017) argues, in the desistance process?

The Scottish Prison Service (SPS) reported that 80% of prisoners were unemployed prior to their incarceration (Scottish Executive, 2015) with it being eight times more difficult for an ex-offender to obtain employment post-release. The greatest factor in someone being refused employment was given as declaration of a criminal record (Scottish Executive, 2015). If those who have returned to the community from prison cannot find legal ways to support themselves then doesn’t this spell recidivism? Isn’t successful prisoner re-entry paramount in the desistance process?

Surely the above percentage highlights the importance of ‘tertiary desistance?’

In fact, Wacquant (2010b, p.612) asks, “How could former prisoners be re-integrated when they were never integrated in the first place and when there is no viable social structure to accommodate them outside” (emphases added). This points to a much bigger context in which those who offend are marginalised to the extent that many of them can’t/won’t desist because they feel that their options are extremely constricted. Surely this is where McNeill’s (2015) idea of ‘tertiary desistance’ comes into play? Perhaps the final destination of desistance is the “promise of equal opportunity, social justice, individual freedom and citizenship rights for all” (Garland, 2001, p.67).

I would argue that this is indeed the case.

But even though I was committed to higher education in prison, I felt that the penal bureaucracy refused to believe (or were at least extremely sceptical) that I could truly change. Realising this made me question whether I would ever be given a chance to ‘turn the corner’ and I spent many hours in silent reflective analysis on this point. I felt somewhat conflicted also due to the fact that I was serious about change yet had to live by the ‘inmate code’ (at least to an extent).

When I went to HMP Low Moss in early 2012, I met the most amazing and wonderful teaching staff that I have ever met in my life. I told them how much I wanted to leave my past behind but was frustrated by obstacles at every turn such as zero prospects of employment and being marginalised by the well-earned stigma that I had created for myself as an ignorant, angry and psychically damaged young man. I told the teachers that it was my newfound ambitions to (a) matriculate into Glasgow University and (b) to volunteer to work for the Violence Reduction Unit (VRU). The VRU (incase you have never heard of them) is an organisation set up by the Scottish police in 2005 to tackle gangs/knife crime.

These teachers (some of whom have since left this particular institution) ignited my motivation, helped me see that I possessed the capacity to sustain change as well as putting in place the opportunities that would be the silver bullet required to neutralise the proverbial werewolf of my past offending activities. By positively reinforcing my motivation, my teachers made me feel like a valued person rather than an offender, which led to the realisation that I had the capacity to foster a lifestyle transplant whereas before I was hesitant about the whole process. Perhaps the real reason for my hesitation was that I had no opportunities to provide the bridge from persistence to desistance. These teachers showed me the way to that bridge. I love them for the warmth, acceptance and altruistic kindness they showed me (if any of you are reading this – you know who you are).

Before I crossed paths with these teachers, I was wrestling with much inner conflict vis-à-vis criminality and the course my life was taking. I wanted to desist but didn’t want to end up with nothing but the ‘pains of desistance’ (Nugent and Schinkel, 2015) for company. In my opinion, this would be akin to swapping one incarceration for another more subtle form of prison. I was worried of being locked in social purgatory between the criminalised world and the non-criminalised world. I definitely credit those teachers, coupled with the birth of my son in 2011, with catalysing my decision to commit to desistance as a way of life. Academic work is the tools I use to achieve this. The only thing I can compare it to is people who ‘find’ religion; I look at academia in the same way.

Academia is my religion.

These days, I do not see myself as I did all of those years ago. I feel that I am shedding the skin of my former way of life thanks to my education, coupled with the periods of deep, critical reflection. I comprehend the damage I did not only to others but also to myself. I have never admitted to or spoken of any of the stuff that I am writing here now for the simple reason that I am slightly stoic. I accept responsibility for my transgressions and see absolutely no point complaining about the mess I made.

In my opinion, refusal to accept responsibility is ‘conduct unbecoming’ of what it means to be a man. Now that I have my own son, I feel that I must be an example to him and show him how not to act – but also how to carry himself as an adult. My Dad did not show me any of these things. I had to learn them for myself – the hard way. Perhaps it is fortunate that my son came into the world in the twilight of my criminality and not during the dawn. The last thing I would ever wish for would be for him to be exposed to anything I experienced during my formative years.

After all, today’s children are tomorrow’s adults.

Now I am older and wiser, which I attribute to my deeply reflective and analytical nature. These idiosyncrasies have served me well in my academic pursuits. Rather than realising notoriety through criminality, my new raison d’être is to show the very small group of people who believe in my transformation that I am worthy of their support. Moreover, I want to form and sustain the deep and rewarding emotional attachments that all humans desire through friendships, romance and things like this. My previous experiences of such ‘relationships’ were built on rather dubious, fragile foundations where one’s friend could turn into a nemesis literally overnight. I think this has affected me to a certain degree but has definitely not rendered me misanthropic.

Rather, I have simply buried my emotions and do not find it easy to take off my mask. My pathological wrath has dissipated and my powers of empathy have significantly developed since my ‘offending days’. Back then, my inability to empathise (or rather my unwillingness to do so) sheltered the straw house I had built in my head to protect myself from the impact and lasting effects of criminality. That same straw house has been blown away, leaving me with the mental, emotional and physical scars of the past. The physical wounds have long since healed but the mental and emotional ones are stark reminders of not only the damage I have done to others but also that which I have done to myself.

In my view, the learned helplessness of my formative years, braided with a denial of powerlessness, metastasised into a lust for powerfulness vis-à-vis gang criminality. This consumed my being and fuelled the rage embedded within my subconscious that was borne of my Dad’s death and issues with my biological mother. Now that I am a Dad, I must ensure that my beautiful, innocent six-year-old son does not grow up with the same deeply fissured, scarred heart.

After all, I have only just sewn mine back together.

References

Garland, D. (2001) The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

McNeill, F. and Weaver, B. (2010) ‘Changing Lives? Desistance Research and Offender Management’, Glasgow: Scottish Centre for Crime & Justice Research. Available online at:  http://www.sccjr.ac.uk/documents/Report%202010_03%20-%20Changing%20Lives.pdf 

McNeill, F. (2014) ‘Punishment as Rehabilitation’, in Bruinsma, G. and Weisburd, D. (eds.) Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Springer, New York: 4195–4206.

McNeill, F. and Schinkel, M. (2015) ‘Prisons and Desistance’ in Jewkes, Y. and Bennett, J. (eds.) Handbook on Prisons, Portland, Oregon: Willan.

McNeill, F. (2017) ‘Punishment, Rehabilitation and Reintegration’, British Criminology Plenary Address, Sheffield Hallam University, 8^th July 2017.

Nugent, B. and Schinkel, M. (2016) ‘The Pains of Desistance’, Criminology and Criminal Justice, Volume 16(5): 568–564.

Scottish Executive (2015) ‘Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974’, Scottish Executive, 20^th May 2015 [online]. Available at: http://www.gov.scot/Publications/2015/05/5592/2 Accessed 10^th April 2017.

Wacquant, L. (2002) ‘Four Strategies to Curb Carceral Costs: On Managing Mass Imprisonment in the United States’, Studies in Political Economy, 69: 19–30.

Wacquant, L. (2010a) ‘Crafting the Neoliberal State: Workfare, Prisonfare and Social Insecurity’, Sociological Forum, Vol. 25(2): 197–220.

Wacquant, L. (2010b) ‘Prisoner Re-entry as Myth and Ceremony’, Dialectical Anthropology, Vol. 34: 605–620.