Discovering Desistance

Steve’s post about the soon to close consultations on community sentences and on probation (organisation) in England and Wales prompted me to offer just a couple of thoughts — mostly about the community sentences consultation. So, in reverse order, as it were, here they are:

Not clever? The latest consultations suggests the UK Government is hoping that ‘toughening up’ community sentences can somehow help with curbing the rise of the prison population (a laudable aspiration if only they would really own it and commit to it) and build public confidence in other sorts of sanction. And yet like many previous governments, they fall into an old trap. By trading on the discourse of punitiveness, they condemn their efforts to failure. As Shadd and Anna King once put it memorably, probation just can’t compete with high walls and razor wire; if punitiveness is the currency, then  imprisonment has a higher value. That’s not to say that community sentences can’t or shouldn’t deliver punishment — they can, and there is evidence that the public will ‘buy’ community punishment. But they’re not daft. Community punishment makes sense as a way of securing positive payback that benefits communities; it can’t compete with prisons when it comes to imposing pains on ‘offenders’. It makes sense as a means of eliciting public good, not as means of imposing penal harm. When community punishment tries to do that, it also undermines its capacity to secure a positive contribution from reforming citizens. The section of the consultation on reparation and RJ implicitly recognises this, but it is underdeveloped and inconsistent with the tone of the rest of the document.

Not tough? What is tough? What does it mean? Is it harder to endure another futile episode of short-term imprisonment or to seriously commit to working hard at paying back positively — including by changing yourself and honouring your responsibilities to people around you? I’m not sure we really know the answer to these questions — I do know that short sentences can and do really hurt– not in the way we expect (i.e. via the pains of doing time), but rather through the dreadful and criminogenic disruptions that they visit upon prisoners and their families. Those interested in some compelling evidence on this should read Sarah Armstrong and Beth Weaver’s report on ‘User Views of Punishment’: (http://www.sccjr.ac.uk/projects/User-Views-of-Punishment/70).

Not big? Anyone remember the Big Society? It doesn’t seem to figure much in these two consultations. Maybe the idea doesn’t apply to criminal justice. Here it seems more a case of ‘The Big Exclusion’. Criminal justice services — and especially community sentences — could and should be recast as a route into active citizenship, as a locus for re-forming, restoring, re-qualifying citizens; basically as a field in which some citizens help other citizens to become citizens, and to enjoy all the rights and responsibilities that a republican version of citizenship entails. That seems to imply a key role for the public sector and for the voluntary and community sector. It doesn’t exclude the private sector — far from it — business has a major role to play, not least as a provider of opportunities for work. But the social capital that desistance requires is more about community development and engagement than private enterprise and shareholder interests. Yet, here we are presented with two documents which seem to have more to offer big business than the big society; one seems insistent on finding new ways to disqualify citizens who have failed and who have been failed; the other seems to insist on creating a market to drive down the costs/improve the quality of the services delivering disqualification (a proposition that seems equally tragic and comic to me at the moment).

Maybe I am lapsing into pessimism here. There are some interesting ideas and some intriguing possibilities in the two consultations. But the tone leaves me cold. The Rehabilitation Revolution can still deliver real and progressive change — but the slip back into punitiveness and the insistence that markets are the only or best mechanism for progress have diminished rather than enhanced its prospects.

Two consultations which set out radical proposals to strengthen community sentences and improve probation services will close in one weeks time.
The wide ranging consultations include proposals for a new rigorous new community sentence, alcohol bans for offenders convicted of certain alcohol fuelled crimes and plans to give local probation areas more control to commission services to better cut crime locally.
The consultations close on Friday 22 June 2012. They include measure such as: :
Community Sentences:
• Intensive Community Punishment sentence – a rigorous new community order for criminals who deserve a serious penalty and who can be dealt with sensibly in the community. It will include a package of punishments including unpaid work, significant restrictions on liberty through a curfew with tagging, exclusion from certain areas, a foreign travel ban, a fine and a driving ban, where appropriate.
• At least one form of punishment element in every sentence – for the first time every community sentence will include one form of punishment from the list outlined above.
• Greater and more creative use of electronic monitoring – using technology, such as GPS, to monitor offenders’ compliance with their sentence and to track their movements.
• Seizing criminal assets – a new power for bailiffs to seize criminals’ possessions.
• Alcohol bans – new power to trial a scheme to ban offenders convicted of alcohol-fuelled crime from drinking as part of a community sentence or suspended sentences using new monitoring technology.
Probation:
• The public sector will retain control of the management of offenders who pose the highest risk, including the most serious and violent criminals to protect the public. They will continue to provide advice to court, and take public interest decisions over all offenders including initially assessing levels of risk, resolving action where sentences are breached, and decisions on the recalls of offenders to prison.
• Greater effectiveness and quality in probation services – extending competition, including for lower-risk offenders, to ensure that probation services are delivered by those best equipped to tackle crime and reoffending, and encourage the most effective rehabilitation measures, whether they are in the public, voluntary, or private sectors. Where possible we will pay providers by measured results.
• Devolving accountability and responsibility – giving Probation Trusts control of local budgets, including electronic monitoring of curfews, so they can deliver programmes targeted at local needs and reducing reoffending.
The proposals set out in two consultations build on the reforms already being taken forward in the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act, which include extending the maximum length of a curfew from 12 hours a day to 16 hours a day, from six months to 12 months and introducing foreign travel bans. The proposals in the probation consultation are designed to build on the intentions of the Offender Management Act 2007 to introduce a much broader range of competition across probation services.

The Community Sentences consultation can be found here and the Probation consultation can be found here

Hi!

Just a quick thank you to those who have taken time out of work to attend the seminars. We’ve all been really pleased with the degree to which people have engaged with the project and been open about what has and has not supported the processes of change they have been a part of. The enthusiasm not just for the film but for the project as a whole has been staggering.

I found the discussions at the two seminar locations I was able to get to (London and Sheffield) really stimulating and these made me think of new things I’d not been aware of before and helped me to think about matters of old in a new light. Really stimulating. I know that Fergus and Claire found the Glasgow seminars really useful too; I’m sure that the last Belfast one will not fail to deliver.

Things might go quiet around here for a while (but Fergus will keep on posting with updates on the film launch and media coverage I am sure) as we beaver away writing up notes and thinking about how we distill all of the wonderful insights you have given us … but we’ll be back.

We’re currently thinking that a useful next step for us will be a write a manifesto based on the most popular of the provocative propositions you were working on during the second seminar.

Feel free to keep on posting comments and do let us know if you’d like things added to the resources page – we’d like this to become something which people can draw on in their own work. Similarly, we’re happy to upload stuff which others would like to share.

I’m now off to lie down in a darkened room …

 

Steve

 

 

 

Just a quick post to let you know that we have moved the venue of the film launch to Lecture Theatre 1 in the Boyd Orr Building at the University of Glasgow. This lecture theatre holds 300 people — allowing for those currently signed up and those on the waiting list, we should have a few more places available, but I’d suggest booking up very soon. We’ll amend the details on Eventbrite tomorrow — meantime, sign up to the waiting list to be sure of getting a place: http://theroadfromcrime.eventbrite.com

Hope to see you there!

This post is another extract (basically the introduction and the conclusion) from a paper with big connections to this project; the full version is available on the Useful Resources page. In it, we set out what we see as some of the limitations of a preoccupation with the question ‘what works?’ when it comes to improving supervision practices — and how looking more closely at how and why people change, and at what ex/offenders and their families/supporters have to say about that process, is critical to progressive development. The paper is coming out soon in a US journal called ‘Justice Research and Policy’ and so uses US terminology which may seem a little alien to some readers. We’re grateful to the editor of JRP for permission to post it here.

Introduction

Questions about the role of evidence in criminal justice policy and practice have been around for a long time. One of the founding fathers of classical criminology, Cesare Beccaria, writing in 1775, put it this way:

‘Would you prevent crimes? Let liberty be attended with knowledge. As knowledge extends, the disadvantages which attend it diminish, and the advantages increase… Knowledge facilitates the comparison of objects, by showing them in different points of view. When the clouds of ignorance are dispelled by the radiance of knowledge, authority trembles, but the force of the law remains immovable’ (in Priestley and Vanstone, 2010: 11).

Alongside his early endorsement of the role of science in promoting public safety, Beccaria demanded clarity in the law, due process in its administration, and certainty and regularity in its delivery of punishments, limited by the principles of parsimony and proportionality. So, for him, as for many that have come after him, delivering criminal justice must be about both evidence and principle; both science and law; both the empirical and the normative.

It is with this central set of relationships in mind that we begin this discussion of ‘evidence-based practice’ (EBP) in the field of community corrections[1]. More specifically, we aim to look at EBP from three different points of view. Firstly, we seek to examine the relationships between the purposes of community corrections and the ways in which we might assess its effectiveness; we argue that these purposes are multiple and contested and that the types of evidence in play are therefore varied and diffuse. Relying on any one measure will fail to capture the complexities of the task. Secondly, even in focusing on one purpose (reducing reoffending so as to better protect the public), we suggest that ‘what works’ evidence drawn from evaluation studies has serious limitations, and that it must be supplemented with evidence from explanatory studies that explore how and why people desist from crime. Finally, we argue that evidence from research is not the only evidence that matters in advancing practice; both ex/offender and practitioner voices need to be taken much more seriously if we are to develop systems and practices that fit the realities of people’s lives. In our concluding discussion, we discuss a transatlantic ‘knowledge exchange’ project, ‘Discovering Desistance’, through which we are currently trying to open up debates and developments around evidence-based corrections.

[…]

Conclusions

This paper has taken what might seem to some a slightly unusual path. Rather than trying to present that latest evidence from research in EBPs in community corrections and issuing academic advice on what policies or practices to adopt, we have tried instead to respect Beccaria’s injunction and to open up new vantage points from which we might examine the claims of evidence on policy and practice.

We have focused here on just three sets of questions. Firstly, we explored the links between evidence and purposes, arguing that since the purposes of community corrections are multiple and contested, a range of approaches to measuring effectiveness is required. Secondly, focusing on just one of the purposes of community corrections – reducing reoffending — we exposed some of the methodological problems that lie behind exploring ‘what works?’ and suggested a wider engagement with evidence about how and why people desist from crime. That evidence base pointed us towards practices that support ex/offenders to develop new skills and change their behaviour, but also towards interventions that can motivate people and build hope, and that engage with the relational and social contexts of change. Finally, we argued that the development of more effective practice in community corrections (as in other domains) is less about getting research evidence into practice and more about academics, ex/offenders, practitioners and others working out how to co-produce change together.

In relation to this venture, Beccaria again has some wise words for us here:

‘Ignorance may be less fatal than a small degree of knowledge, because this adds, to the evils of ignorance, the inevitable errors of a confined view of things…’ (Priestley and Vanstone, 2010: 12).

We are all vulnerable to developing ‘a confined view’; to privileging our own perspective; to preferring to rely on the small degrees of knowledge that we accrue as individuals. And we all stand the best chance of avoiding the errors attendant on taking such ‘a confined view’ by exposing ourselves to the views of others. This is not to suggest that all forms of knowledge should be assessed and used in the same ways – and, of course, it is not to refute the need to expose and reject policies and practices based in ignorance or error, whatever their source. But it is to argue for the learning that comes from mutually respectful dialogue, since it is in that dialogue that the prospects for progressive community corrections resides.

If you want to read the full version, click here: McNeill et al JRP

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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.

Not sure whether this is good news or bad, but the lauch event for the film has sold out in 48 hours! Don’t despair however, if you haven’t been able to register. We have added a facility to Eventbrite to allow us to develop a reserve list and, if the interest continues to grow, we’ll look for a larger venue, or perhaps arrange  a second screening. So, please, do continue to register your interest at:  http://theroadfromcrime.eventbrite.com/ 

And thanks to everyone who has registered already!