Discovering Desistance

After all the excitment of the workshops, the film launch, and getting the film out there online, it feels as if the pace of the whole project has settled down to a slightly more manageable pace! That said, we did enjoy the excitement last week of actually holding the completed DVD in our hands. These are now available to order at: http://www.universityofglasgowshops.com/product_info.php?cPath=1_3_19&products_id=618

Since most of the production costs of the film were met by the ESRC, we have decided that any proceeds from sales will be donated to ex-offender organisations; thus allowing the film (hopefully) to sponsor work to support desistance and reintegration. Our production run was only 500 copies, and about 100 of those are already accounted for, so if you want a copy of the DVD, best order soon!

Meanwhile, the feedback about the film has been coming thick and fast (you can see some comments on the documentary page) — and it has been universally very positive. The decision to have the film subtitled in various languages was a good one; it has been really good to receive positive reactions — even excitement! — from European friends and colleagues. The Criminal Sanctions Agency in Finland have already paid for translation of the film into Finnish; maybe other probation organisations or NGOs will do likewise.   

As well as the official launch, we have shown the film at the British Society of Criminology conference and have definite plans for showings in Sheffield and in Chicago (at the American Society of Criminology conferene). We’re also setting up showing in Boston and Orlando, and perhaps in Adelaide and Sydney.

While it’s great that people have been so interested in and affected by the film and its messages, perhaps the most satisfying thing about the reaction has been the number of people and organisations getting in touch about their plans to actually use the film in their work. Though that outcome perhaps reaches beyond what we dared to expect, it is exactly what we hoped for — and we’re delighted to see others engage with and use the film in ways that we didn’t necessarily imagine ourselves. All we ask is to be kept informed…

We’re still working on the report summing up the main learning from the workshops, and on various other papers. So keep watching this space and thanks again for all your support and encouragement.

hi,

The Univ. of Sheffield is involved in a European-wdie initiative called Researcher’s Night. This year it is on the 28th Sept, and we will be showing The Road from Crime as part of that event. The events (all of them, not just the film) are free to any member of the public – just pitch up on the night.

I’ll post more details (venue and time) nearer the time. I’m hoping that Charlie Smith, Raymond Lunn and Allan Weaver (who all appear in the film) will all be able to make it along for a Q&A session after the film.

Please do pass this on to people who might want to come along.

 

With best wishes,

Stephen

The road from crime film is now available to view on-line and to download –  see https://www.iriss.org.uk/resources/videos/road-crime.

The film is available with (or without) English, French, Spanish, German or Finnish subtitles.

We would welcome any feedback about the film, and would be delighted to hear about how you use it and the impact it has.  You can add comments at the bottom of this page if you so wish.

We hope you find the film thought provoking and useful.

Many thanks to all of you who took part in the desistance workshops.

The workshops took place between April and June 2012 in Belfast, Glasgow, London and Sheffield.  We held two workshops at each location.

 

Details of the workshop process, and the notes and outputs from each workshop are detailed in the reports below.  The reports present the outputs of the workshops without offering any comment or analysis.  We would welcome any feedback and discussion.

• Report on Belfast desistance workshops (held on 14 May and 25 June 2012)
• Report on the Glasgow desistance workshops (held on 10 April and 16 May 2012)
• Report on the London desistance workshops (held 11 May & 11 June 2012)
• Report on Sheffield desistance workshops (held on 10 May & 14 June 2012)

 

This is a guest post from John Todd, Head of the Reducing Offending Unit in the Ministry of Justice in Northern Ireland. John was a participant in the two workshops we convened in Belfast. His post outlines some interesting developments in the relationships between desistance research and criminal justice policy. 

I thought readers of the blog might be interested in a consultation document on reducing offending we in the Department of Justice Northern Ireland have published recently.  The document sets out a Strategic Framework for Reducing Offending, which seeks to both address the factors leading people into criminal behaviour and the obstacles to them moving away from it.

So, although the framework goes a bit beyond desistance and reducing reoffending to take in prevention and diversion, we would be very interested in your opinions on our plans to reduce offending in Northern Ireland.

The consultation and related documents (including the evidence base that supports the framework) can be found here: http://www.dojni.gov.uk/index/public-consultations/current-consultations/strategic-framework-for-reducing-offending-consultation.htm.

You will see that we have set out eight core principles for reducing offending (including that we should be focused on desistance).  We also propose a number of outputs and outcomes.  The outcomes include reducing the number of young people entering the justice system for the first time, reducing repeat victimisation, reducing rates of reoffending and reducing the average age of desistance from crime in Northern Ireland.  The final of these outcomes will be something new for us and require the establishment of measuring techniques and baselines.

We’d warmly welcome responses to the consultation – a response form can be found at the link above.

 

 

This is a post I wrote for the No Offence blog; they were kind enough to allow us to post it here too: 

There is a great theatre in Glasgow called ‘The Citizens’ Theatre’ which, amongst many other things, does excellent work with prisoners. Glaswegians know it simply as ‘The Citz’. Sitting in the second ‘Discovering Desistance’ workshop in Sheffield, that name came into my mind as we were discussing (not for the first time in the workshops, on the blog or on Twitter) how to refer to the people we currently refer to as ‘offenders’ and ‘ex-offenders’.

As I’ve written a couple of times on the Discovering Desistance blog already, I’m becoming convinced that the notion of citizenship offers us a potential way forward in terms of getting past the criminal justice obsession with risk, harm, reoffending; it encourages us to re-focus on the positive goods that justice tries to secure rather than on the evils it seeks to prevent.

But equally, citizenship might help with the problem of labeling people in criminal justice too. Perhaps, rather than labeling people by harms caused or offences done in the past (which we do even when we are defining people as ‘ex’ or as ‘reformed’), we should label them in terms of what we are inviting or enabling them to become – or recognizing what they have become?

‘Offenders’, after all, are failed citizens in two senses. They have failed to honour their responsibilities as citizens and, more often than not, they have been failed as citizens. Failed, that is, by a State that hasn’t honoured its side of the social contract; that hasn’t enabled or supported the development of their citizenship.

Scholars of citizenship will have recognized that I’m using the term in its ‘republican’ rather than its ‘liberal’ sense here. The basic difference is that republican citizenship extends the ambit of rights beyond freedom from interference with our individual liberties and into freedom to enjoy certain positive rights. The idea is that there are services or resources that we all require before citizenship comes to mean anything. The right to education is an obvious example; without it, formal equality of opportunity is pretty meaningless.

So, might we think of ‘offenders’ or ‘ex-offenders’ instead as ‘re-citz’? The ‘re’ here might stand simultaneously for re-formed, re-stored, re-integrated, re-habilitated, re-qualified; people who are ready to honour their responsibilities and to enjoy their rights. Both rights and responsibilities are part of supporting and achieving desistance. Of course, the other meaning of ‘re-sits’ will be familiar to students and ex-students; re-sits are second chances to pass the course and to qualify. That seems to work in this context too [though both the individual and the State need to pass the test].

One last thought: over the course of the Discovering Desistance project, I’ve been developing more and more respect and admiration for the work of ‘ex-offenders’ in and beyond the criminal justice system. Many of them strike me not just as ‘re-citz’ but as ‘super-citz’; people who are putting themselves on the line for the good of others. They are doing more than what can be reasonably expected of any citizen. Their actions are what moral philosophers call ‘supererogatory’; above and beyond the call of duty. Our current honours system has recognized the contributions of some of them – like Bobby Cummines OBE. But imagine a whole honours system based on recognising those whose service to the common good had been supererogatory; a system based on asking who has travelled furthest and given most to building a better society? I can think of a few ‘super-citz’ I’d want to see honoured in that system; mostly people who have long since defied and transcended the label ‘offender’.

This guest post comes from Jessica Simons, a sociology student at the University of Glasgow who is looking for some help with her research project….

 Having experienced someone close to me go through the criminal justice system, it seems to me that it is often very easy for people to become lost in that process. Sometimes it appears that government programmes and policies have failed to understand the very personal and complex journey of desistance from crime and the internal process which ex-offenders undergo in order to change. With this focus in mind, I would like the chance to discover the meaning of desistance, and the challenges which it brings, from people who have themselves experienced it. This is what has led me to undertake this research project as part of my MA degree.

Would you be willing to share your experiences and contribute to my research? I am currently working on my undergraduate dissertation for Sociology at the University of Glasgow and am very interested in talking to people to explore the area of ex-offender reintegration and rehabilitation. My research hopes to explore ex-offenders’ personal experiences and views on the process of desisting from crime, and how they feel this has affected the person they are today.

Through this blog post, I hope to meet people who are willing to share their stories of their life post-sentence. I am interested in hearing your views and experiences of criminal justice, how people react to you as an ‘ex-offender’, what role support networks play in your life, and your hopes for the future.

I would like to speak to 10 ex-offenders in total and hopefully conduct face-to-face interviews or interviews over the phone. Face-to-face interviews will be done in a private and quiet space on the university campus at a time which is convenient for you. If you are interested in taking part or if you have any questions about the research, please get in touch by emailing me at: 1003938S@student.gla.ac.uk.

 

Iriss.fm is a new internet radio station intended as a forum where all involved in social services can share opinion, knowledge and experience.

You can now listen to our show entitled Discovering Desistance.

The recording was made on the 16 May and involves a discussion with four of the participants at the second of two workshops held in Glasgow.

We will shortly be making the notes available from the Glasgow workshops but for now hope you enjoy the show!

Below is a blog post from Neil Hutton, Professor at the Centre for Law Crime and Justice, University of Strathclyde.

First, congratulations on the film. A very moving and professional looking piece of work which will be a very useful resource for teaching, training and raising awareness more generally.

The film  unashamedly told the story from  the offender perspective, but did not seek sympathy for offenders but instead focused on the negativity of imprisonment. “A prison sentence starts when you walk out of the prison gates.” The film showed how prison disqualifies and excludes far beyond the term of the sentence.

Almost inevitably, most of the ex-offenders interviewed were highly articulate, intelligent, perceptive and even charismatic: extraordinary people. I was struck again by how difficult it must be to radically change your life, how brave to  take the responsibility to be the author of a new life. Most of us bumble along,  only rarely required to make the kind of courageous decisions or demonstrate the kind of steely determination that these guys have had to do. But they show that it can be done, that there is hope alongside the poverty, unemployment, drink and drugs and all the rest of it. But if it is hard for these guys to succeed, how much harder for the less gifted offenders.  Amongst other things, desistance requires patience from the authorities and a willingness to give offenders a second  chance (or even a tenth chance) to make the changes which they want to achieve but find difficult. The challenge is to find ways not just to stop less serious offenders going to prison in the first place but ensuring that those sentenced to community payback are not returned too swiftly to prison when for whatever reason they breach a condition of their order. Desistance takes time.

Alan Weaver does a very fine  job as presenter and the music is great. I will definitely be using this for teaching next year. Thanks to all involved for a great idea brilliantly executed

With the film launch just 2 hours away, and before I head off to get my make-up and hair done, I thought I’d put up a few links to the Scottish media coverage for this in foreign lands.

Here’s the BBC report: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-18490073

And here’s the excellent piece in yesterday’s Sunday Herald: http://www.heraldscotland.com/mobile/news/crime-courts/the-real-life-lesson-of-the-angels-share.17855575

Look out for more in the Daily Record tomorrow.