Discovering Desistance

I had an interesting week last week. On Thursday I presented at the CLINKS conference (on the role of the voluntary and community sector in supporting desistance). Lesley Fraser at CLINKS has spared me a job by writing up the talk for CLINKS’s blog – you can find her version of what I said (which is a lot more fluent that I remember it) here: http://clinks.ning.com/profiles/blogs/what-matters-thinking-differently

Then, on Friday, I spent the day with a small group of staff from Cumbria Probation Trust. This was the second time that I have used a kind of Appreciative Inquiry model (learned from using AI as a research methodology in the Quality in Probation Supervision study led by Joanna Shapland at the University of Sheffield and involving Steve Farrall, Camilla Priede and Gwen Robinson) to open up a kind of structured conversation about how to develop probation services that better support desistance. I owe my understanding of AI mainly to Gwen Robinson, who has studied the applicability of this method in probation research, and to Alison Liebling, who has used it so sensitively and successfully in prisons.

Appreciative Inquiry (AI) works by focusing on ‘what is good, strong, already working and being achieved…  [the] aim [is] to find out ‘what’s right’ and help ‘enhance it’’ (Carter 2006: 50). So it involves looking in depth at best experiences, strengths, accomplishments, best practices, and “peak moments” in an organisation’s history, rather than starting with a problem orientation and then try to ‘fix’ the problems that are found. In that sense, it is a kind of strengths-based approach.

In its fullest/purest form, it involves working through the ‘appreciative 4-D cycle’ which consists of 4 phases. Though this is impossible to do adequately in just a few hours, when talking to Probation Trusts I have structured it in this sort of way:

We start with a central question: ‘What is working well to support service users in this Trust to desist from crime?’ How can we make further progress in this area, drawing on the research evidence presented and on our own professional experiences? I begin with an input on desistance research, followed by a brief Q&A, before moving into the 4 phases:

Discovery Phase: The aim in this phase is to inquire, explore and appreciate ‘the best of what is’ in any given situation. The task is to zero in on the factors and forces that have made the Trust’s best practices (to support desistance) possible. For example: best experiences in supporting people to change; desistance-related achievements people feel particularly proud of; which particular talent/skills/attitudes the Trust and its staff bring to work that makes a difference in supporting change.

Dream Phase: Drawing on the examples of innovation or best practice/experiences that have been discussed, images of the ‘possible future’ for the Trust should emerge. In this phase, the aim is to develop ‘provocative propositions’ that realistically sum up ‘what could be’. These are developed out of what participants have shared in the discovery phase. Cumbria came up with some great propositions!

Design Phase: Here, the focus is on creating an ideal organisation, based on grounded examples that have emerged from the successes and achievements of the past. It requires us to examine possible choices and priorities that might determine what the Trust might look like if its services were designed in such a way as to best support desistance.

Destiny Phase: This is the hardest phase to grasp – it is centrally about ‘making change happen’. Basically, it is an invitation to construct the future through innovation and action.

Though I’d have to admit that these last two stages have been too rushed in the workshops that I’ve run so far, I think both Trusts (the other one being Kent) did finish with some clear ideas about how to develop services and what to prioritise, both in terms of strategies and practices.

Now that we are turning our attention towards how we approach the workshops in this project, with the film as the stimulus material, I’m wondering whether we couldn’t use a similar technique. One obvious limitation of the workshops I have run so far is that they haven’t involved ex-offenders or service users, let alone familes and significant others. Perhaps if the workshops for this project can really gather together these different experiences and perspectives, we can get an even deeper and doubtless much more challenging engagement with the issues.

Yesterday, talking to a colleague in the Scottish Prison Service, I had the idea of running AI-style workshops in custody with prisoners, their supporters and staff, with the film as the starter for 10. We don’t have funding to do that (yet)… but what a tempting prospect!

In the latest in a series of excellent posts from doctoral researchers, Marguerite Schinkel of Edinburgh University reflects on previous research experience looking into ‘recovery competencies’ in relation to mental health. 

There has been some discussion on this blog about the parallels (and overlap in the target groups) between recovery from addictions and desistance. Fergus’s recent article in the Howard Journal (Counterblast: A Copernican Correction for Community Sentences?) made me reflect on the similarities between the work done on recovery in the mental health field and desistance.

A few years ago a friend and I conducted a piece of research for what was then the Scottish Executive on recovery competencies, or the skills and values mental health workers needed to help people to recover. We spoke to different groups of people using mental health services, as well as groups of professionals and carers. When you substitute the word desistance for the word recovery in our eventual recommendations, it is interesting how many are relevant. For example, our participants emphasised the need for mutual respectful relationships, that workers have a belief in recovery (see also interesting articles on the importance of hope in a reintegration or social work context here and here), involve significant others and focus on strengths rather than weaknesses. Other recommendations would be more difficult to make in a criminal justice context, but are probably no less apt for all that. For example, our participants said they found it helpful when their workers shared something of themselves in the relationship, making the interaction thereby more genuine, and did not hide behind professional boundaries. They also wanted to have a greater say, and more options, in their care.  After we wrote the report we reflected on our recommendations and realised that some of them were contradictory. For example, what happens when a person is feeling hopeless themselves. How does the worker then balance the need to promote recovery and to take the person’s experiences seriously? Or, while some participants wanted greater involvement of their significant others, others felt this would hamper their recovery. This highlights the danger of working with set tick-lists and shows that the real skill is in finding a balance between the different principles by tuning into the individual. Challenges, choices, and participation have to be negotiated with people themselves, and tailored to the individual. This mirrors the point Fergus makes in his article:

Since desistance is an inherently individualised and subjective process, approaches to supervision must accommodate and exploit issues of identity and diversity. There are, therefore, important limitations for one-size-fits-all approaches to rehabilitation.

As many people, notably mental health service users, have been working for a long time to bring about a more recovery oriented ethos in the mental health field, there is a wealth of resources that I would argue are a useful (initial) guide if we want to change the way we work with offenders, at least as a starting point. For example The Scottish Recovery Network holds publications related to recovery-oriented practice training, developing recovery oriented services and more. I would also say that mental health services have been much more thoughtful and successful in employing peer support workers, but that is a whole other story.

This post comes from Jake Phillips, Doctoral Researcher at the Institute of Criminology in Cambridge.

I have been following this blog with great interest over the last few months and thank those involved in the Discovering Desistance project for bringing a much needed discussion into the public domain. I have been particularly interested in Fergus and Shadd’s discussions on learning about rehabilitation from disciplines beyond those traditionally associated with work with offenders as well as Fergus’s suggestion (in his ‘Four forms of ‘offender’ rehabilitation’ paper, available on the ‘Useful Resources’ page) that the dominant mode of practice in rehabilitative work at the moment, which is encapsulated by the What Works paradigm and the Risk-Needs-Responsivity model (RNR), has failed to take account of legal, moral and social forms of rehabilitation. What’s more, as Fergus and others have also argued, the implementation of the model has been simplified to: ‘Employ social learning and cognitive behavioural strategies’. The reason for this particular interest is that I am hoping to conduct research into this idea in the future (pending funding!).

My argument begins from the idea that cognitive behaviouralism has become the doxa within correctional practice. Behavioural therapy is presented as an ‘“objective knowledge” verified by an experimental test… devoid of any inherent prescriptive thrust or implicit system of values’ (Woolfolk and Richardson, 1984: 777). However, this is not so clear-cut, as Woofolk and Richardson continue:

The close affinity of the Weltanschauung of behavior therapy and that of modernity can be seen clearly by examining the presence in behavior therapy of four distinct but interrelated aspects of modernity: technicism, rationality, amorality, and humanism. (1984: 778)

This isn’t the place for a detailed critique of Woofolk and Richardson’s argument: it is sufficient to say here that behavioural therapy, of which cognitive behaviouralism is a close relation, is closely linked to the ideology of modernity: one of progress, rationality and the infallibility of science. For this ideology to have become the doxa means that the reality of practice (or policy at least) has become ‘indissociable’ from the ideology underpinning cognitive behaviouralism and that alternative ideas are ‘thrust beyond the very bounds of the thinkable’ (Eagleton, 1991: 58). We can see this clearly in the dominance of cognitive behaviouralism in ‘accredited programmes’ on offer by probation services around the world (see the STARR Final Report for a look at how many programmes across Europe use cognitive behavioural approaches). Fortunately, the work of Shadd, Stephen, Fergus and others have begun to (re-)introduce alternative ideas in response to the increased reification of cognitive behaviouralism as the only means to help offenders desist from offending.

As Eagleton argues further, an ideology becomes the doxa once what is universal appears to be natural. It results in ways of thinking about reality in terms of ‘common sense’. Statements such as “it goes without saying” or “Of course!” prevail. But this is not the case: an ideology becomes universal and natural because of the ideology’s ‘tacit denial that ideas and beliefs are specific to a particular time and place’ (Eagleton 1991: 59). As Seung’s (1996: 170) reading of Socrates suggests, ‘as long as one lives in the domain of doxa, one is enslaved to the prevailing opinions of the social world’.

The problem is that where a doxa exists any opposing ideology gets subsumed by the ideology. Thus, in order to displace a doxatic ideology, the ideology first needs to exposed and alternative ideas need to be leveraged into the resulting ‘gap’. This is where the interdisciplinary perspective comes in: work with offenders is not the only arena in which people’s behaviour is explicitly changed. Rather, there are numerous examples of academics, professionals and the general public engaging with others to encourage compliance with social norms. What’s more, there are a variety of methods that are making an intervention in fields where a doxa exists – these fields represent useful starting points for exposing the ideology of cognitive behaviouralism and the similarities between them can be used to fill the resulting gap. I call these methods ‘uncommon sense’ approaches to changing people’s behaviour.

Schools and pedagogy

There is a growing body of alternative pedagogies in the field of education. Hart et al.’s (2004) book Learning Without Limits encourages teachers to work beyond the limits imposed by preconceptions of ‘ability’. This links with probation practice because all offenders are labelled according to risk. In turn, this affects a probation officer’s belief in their ability to change (something I’ve seen in my doctoral work). One of the main criticisms to be levelled at the RNR model is that it concentrates on offenders’ deficits to the detriment of their possibilities. Thus, according to the ‘without limits’ thesis, correctional practitioners should avoid emphasising an offender’s (in)ability to change and instead prioritise the process of change. Whilst the Good Lives Model (put forth by Tony Ward) already adopts this stance, there has been little done on looking to work in other disciplines that espouse a similar methodology.

Westwood argues that the ‘the typical approach to behaviour problems in schools is to be reactive and aversive rather preventive’ and proposes the Positive Behaviour Support model which is ‘proactive and reduce[s] the likelihood that serious problems will arise’ as an alternative (2007). Probation has to be, by its very nature, reactive and it utilises many of the same methods seen in the ‘typical’ classroom: namely punishments and rewards that are utilised to make people comply (a similar approach can be seen in the Incentives and Earned Privileges scheme in prisons), But it doesn’t have to be this way. What other models of working with ‘difficult’ people exist in other disciplines that can be applied to probation practice? Students who are excluded from school and the work conducted in pupil referral units are of particular relevance. Probation officers and teachers undertake similar work in this regard: both have to reintegrate people who have been excluded from a society or community. In turn, this raises the possibility of using criminological literature on compliance to influence the way teachers manage behaviour because desistance theory can shed light on how a pupil might desist from future disruptive behaviour.

Parenting

We have all seen programmes like Super Nanny in which rewards and punishments are utilised to coerce or cajole children into behaving ‘well’. Such a method of dealing with children has become the doxa within parenting guides (one has only to flick through some of the most popular parenting books to discern such a trend and everyone has heard of the use of star charts etc.) However, several alternative means of encouraging ‘good’ behaviour in children exist. For example, Kohn (2007) uses psychological research to advise parents to avoid the ‘common sense’ approach of rewards and punishments and instead provide children with unconditional love and reason. Wang and Aamodt (2011) argue that, contrary to popular opinion, learning self-restraint and will-power need not be unpleasant for the child. Interestingly, these attributes play an important role in several influential criminological theories. Importantly, these authors redefine desirable behaviour by asking whether we want children to be compliant in the short-term or happy and independent in the long-term. These questions are already being applied to offenders through concepts such as primary and secondary desistance. ‘Uncommon sense’ parenting can also shed light on the aetiology of ‘problem’ behaviour: Cohen, the author of Playful Parenting, for example, agues that ‘aggressive play’ is simply a manifestation of a child’s need to come to terms with the limited choices they have in their life and so should be encouraged (within limits): could such an idea contribute towards a better understanding of the onset of, and desistance from, deviant behaviour? Although desistance theorists might argue that a desistance model of practice would be incompatible with the very theory of desistance, I believe that there is potential in looking to research and ‘parenting guides’ to explore how else we might encourage long-term compliance with social norms as opposed to the current focus on short-term compliance with technical conditions of a Community Order.

Recovery

‘Recovery’ advocates in the field of drug treatment argue that recovery is preferable to maintenance on drug replacement therapy (e.g. methadone). This links with critiques of probation policy’s tendency to predicate short term reductions in reoffending over long-term changes in identity. The government has proposed prioritising recovery over maintenance and these changes in policy and practice and so I am interested in how these changes will play out in practice, and how the idea may work more broadly with offenders. It’s interesting to note that these shifts are similar to the way parenting gurus redefine desirable behaviour in children.

The work done by desistance theorists has already gone a considerable way towards leveraging a critique of cognitive behaviouralism into the small gap that exists between reality and the ideology but this research will expand the empirical and theoretical basis of this work by taking a distinctly interdisciplinary approach. Needless to say, this research is still in a nascent stage and any comments would be appreciated! I still have more questions than answers, including:

•  How can the research on children translate to adult offenders?
• What exactly is the ideology underpinning cognitive behaviouralism (my explanation above is far from sufficient)?
• What are the implications of using texts that are distinctly partial in their approach (many of the parenting books mentioned above read like propaganda texts at times, despite being based on ‘evidence’)?
• Where else can we identify examples of ‘uncommon sense’ approaches to dealing with ‘difficult’ behaviour and what can they tell us about the work of rehabilitative work with offenders.

Sorry this post has turned out to be so long… hope it is of some interest.

References

Eagleton T (1991) Ideology: an introduction. London: Verso.

Hart S, Annabelle D, Mary Jane D and Donald M (2004) Learning Without Limits. Maidenhead: Open University Press.

Kohn A (2007) Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason. New York: Atria Books.

Seung TK (1996) Plato rediscovered: human value and social order. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

Wang SA& Aamodt S (2011) Welome to Your Child’s Brain. London: Bloomsbury.

Westwood PS (2007) Commonsense methods for children with special educational needs. London: Taylor & Francis.

Woolfolk RL and Richardson FC (1984) Behavior therapy and the ideology of modernity. American Psychologist 39(7): 777.

Many desistance researchers will know the work of Chris Uggen at Minnesota. Chris is also one of the earliest and most interesting criminological bloggers in the blogosphere. He has started posting less frequently these days (as we are discovering, keeping up a blog aint for wimps), but he recently had a real cracker on “Stale Records”.  See http://chrisuggen.blogspot.com/  and scroll down to 13 January. There are some important links within his article and when you read the links there are other important links within those articles. All in all, I estimate, it should eat about 45 minutes of your time getting lost in all the links, but it will be time well spent, reviewing crucial new research from Blumstein, Brame, Bushway and others. Good old internet.

If you’re really interested, I have weighed in on this conversation about ‘redemption time’ and criminal records, myself, in an invited chapter to the book Contemporary Issues in Criminal Justice Policy by Natasha Frost, et al (scroll to page 53 in the Google Books version…)

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=NKoomSWqXxcC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Contemporary+Issues+in+Criminal+Justice+Policy&hl=en&sa=X&ei=JQYUT5CYEYjb8gOXtoTvAw&ved=0CDoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=shadd&f=false

I don’t think anyone has ever read that chapter but it is one of my favourites. Email me if you want a Microsoft Word version of the paper. Probably easlier to read.

Shadd, s.maruna@qub.ac.uk

 

This post comes from Tom O’Connor, PhD., who is CEO of Transforming Corrections, and who works to foster a more compassionate, more effective, and less costly US criminal justice system. Tom teaches Criminology at Western Oregon University, and his
research focus is on the role of the community and humanist, spiritual, and
religious ways of making meaning in the desistance process.

I thought you might be interested in this new study on the recidivism impact of prison visits to a sample of over 16,000 men and women in prison over a 5 year period in Minnesota.

A Huffington Post article summarizes the findings this way:

“The study, by researchers with the Minnesota Department of Corrections determined that prisoners who received at least one personal visit at any time during their incarceration were 13 percent less likely to commit another felony and 25 percent less likely to end up back in prison on a technical parole violation. Data showed that the more visits prisoners received, the lower their chance of re-offending after release.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/07/prison-visits-inmates_n_1135288.html

Here are a few excerpts from the research paper itself.

“The results also showed that visits from siblings, in-laws, fathers, and clergy were the most beneficial in reducing the risk of recidivism, whereas visits from ex-spouses significantly increased the risk. The findings suggest that revising prison visitation policies to make them more “visitor friendly” could yield public safety benefits by helping offenders establish a continuum of social support from prison to the community. We anticipate, however, that revising existing policies would not likely increase visitation to a significant extent among unvisited inmates, who comprised 39% of our sample. Accordingly, we suggest that correctional systems consider allocating greater resources to increase visitation among inmates with little or no social support.”

“Because many offenders have burned bridges with loved ones by the time they reach prison, facilitating visits from friends and family may not be an option. Yet, considering the impact visits from clergy and, to a lesser extent, mentors appear to have on reoffending, it may be beneficial for visitation programs to focus on facilitating visits from clergy, mentors, and other volunteers from the community.”

A few colleagues and I recently did a survey of the over 2,216 people who volunteer in the prisons or in reentry with the Oregon Department of Corrections.  The department’s volunteer program is organized by the chaplaincy or religious services unit. 47% of the volunteers categorized themselves as primarily a “religious volunteer”, 32% as a “spiritual volunteer” and 22% as a “secular or humanist volunteer”.  The volunteers run a whole host of programs/services such as visiting people on death row, college classes, Native American sweat lodge ceremonies, Catholic mass, Protestant services, Buddhist meditation, Muslim Jumah prayer, Wiccan circles, high school education, AA/NA groups Toastmasters, yoga, and reentry support/mentoring.

From the responses we estimated that the average volunteer gives nine hours of service each month, with six hours of prep time and five hours of driving. In total we estimated that volunteers drove 5,000,000 miles and gave 404,199 hours of their time each year which is the equivalent of about 194 full-time staff hours. 194 staff would cost the department $13.2 million each year in salaries and benefits. This represents a huge amount of human and social capital that is clearly a vital and inherent part of any desistance processes or narratives that people might engage. This interaction and engagement does not belong to the criminal justice system, it belongs to the community and to the people in prison. But the criminal justice system can do a great deal to hinder or to facilitate this engagement.

The article on prison visiting points out that many systems do not make it particularly easy for people to visit [or the volunteer], and the rural location of many prisons in the states compounds the difficulties of visiting and interacting with the wider community. But the strength of the findings from the visiting study give me hope and remind me that it is often the simple things in life that make a big difference.

 

This challenging post, the latest in a series of guest postings, is from Martin Glynn, a criminologist with over 25 years of experience working in prisons and schools. He has a Cert. Ed, a Masters degree in criminal justice policy and practice, and is currently doing his PhD at Birmingham City University where he is also a visiting lecturer. As a writer and theatre director, Martin has gained a national and international reputation for his commissioned work in theatre, live performance, radio drama, children’s books, and performance poetry. In Jan 2010 Martin was awarded a Winston Churchill International Travel Fellowship where he spent several weeks in the city of Baltimore and Johns Hopkins University (USA) looking at issues of fatherlessness, father hunger, and father deficit amongst young black men. In Oct 2010 Martin was also awarded a prestigious local heroes award by ‘The Association of Jamaica Nationals’ (Birmingham). Martins intergenerational one-act play about the physical and emotional effects of glaucoma, Kind of Blue, will be  featured in the book (Ethno theatre: Research from Page to Stage, edited by Johnny Saldana, Left Coast Press,2012).

If you would like to contribute a post to this blog, just email me: fergus.mcneill@glasgow.ac.uk

Black men’s desistance (Martin Glynn)

Desistance is about how offenders orient themselves away from committing crimes. However,  understandings of black men’s desistance are very limited and unclear within the research literature; the voices of black men have hardly been heard within  discussions of desistance. To address this gap, I suggest the construction of black men’s desistance should steer itself away from reinforcing generalising assumptions within the study of desistance as a whole. To do this I looked at black men’s desistance through a lens that is ‘intersectional’. By ‘intersectional’ I refer to inter-connected aspects of identity like race, class, and gender. If the attention paid to race in the literature on men’s desistance has been scant, then the study of these intersecting identitieshas also conspicuous by its absence.

As an activist turned academic,  I have been able to gain direct access to working with (not on) black men who have desisted; those who are journeying towards desistance; and others who are struggling to desist. By focussing on the stories and experiences of black men themselves, I sought to bring some much needed clarity to the question of how black men themselves construct their own trajectories towards desistance. Their narratives concretely countered persistent ‘limited insights’ by ‘colour-blind’ criminologists. Furthermore, many of those I engaged with expressed the view that such criminologists at times rendered their ‘racialised’ insights ‘invisible’ in the ‘pursuit of ‘neutrality’ and ‘objectivity’.

Because black men’s accounts of desistance have largely gone unnoticed by scholars and the public to date I used Critical Race Theory (CRT), a key theoretical framework, to look at black men’s desistance. CRT has been widely applied to law , education, and more recently sport . CRT creates a different lens through which to  study desistance by providing an analytical framework for racialised and subordinated voices within a theory of desistance, and to expand the study of desistance as a whole. There are two distinct storytelling positions within CRT: ‘. Solorzano & Yosso (2002) suggest that ‘white privilege’ is often expressed through ‘majoritarian stories’, whilst ‘counter-stories’ are often expressed to challenge assumptions designed to subordinate black men. A significant recurring issue  that created a barrier to desistance for black men centred around the construction of their ‘self-concept’.  Their sense of a ‘loss of identity’ featured heavily in the way many black men I spoke to felt disempowered and oppressed.  DuBois (1938) cites ‘Double Consciousness’ as a causal factor of black men’s poor self-concept based on the impact of living in a racist society:

one ever feels his two-ness, an American, a negro, two souls, two thoughts, two un-reconciled strivings two warring ideals in one body, (p.8).

Dubois saw ‘double consciousness’ as a way that racism debilitated and undermined black men’s talents, abilities, and insights, which is also referred to as the ‘invisibility syndrome’. Invisibility is process by which dominant or hegemonic assumptions made by white people renders black self-concept invisible or devalued, reinforcing notions of ‘white privilege’ and ‘superiority’. Franklin (2004) sees this deficit as a form of extreme social exclusion which severely limits black men’s self-actualisation. Black prisoners said they experienced a similar invisibility in many areas of prison regimes: food provision (lack of cultural foods), reading material (black literature), staffing (little diversity) and little or no sense of being a culturally diverse community (small numbers of black men). Likewise, in the community, the research revealed how the lack of validation of their sense of ‘blackness’ sets up a level of distrust that can, and does, create barriers in the way of their trajectories towards desistance. Solorzano & Yosso (2002) argue that racism ‘distorts and silences the experiences of people of colour’ (p.31). This situation could explain why some black men retreat and stay in the confines of criminal behaviour, as they do not feel that their ‘desisted self’ will be validated, as they are constantly having to defend their racial existence (Spence 2010).

My research therefore  has suggested how individual stories of desistance that black men produced could be seen as ‘counter-stories’ that explored how black men articulated their strategies of desistance in ways that countered the way ‘colour-blind’ criminologists have largely presumed (when interviewing mostly white men) that desistance operates similarly for all men. These ‘counter-narratives’ provided by black men  demonstrate the urgency of bringing an intersectional analysis to desistance . The overrepresentation of black men in both the UK and US prison populations demands some different explanations using these sorts of critical approaches.

There’s a lovely piece in the NYT this morning proving again that the vast literature and thinking on recovery has much to teach us in desistance studies on philosophy and addiction:

Feel free to respond to the author directly on the NYT page, but I’d also be interested in hearing what readers of this blog think about the implications of this for desistance work.

Philosophy has been a somewhat untapped resource in the discussions around desistance to date, although work by Fergus and Stephen has opened up this door. Also, as I mentioned in a previous entry, there is a group of philosophically oriented scholars based primarily but not exclusively in the philosophy department at John Jay in NYC with interests in philosophy and desistance.

Happy New Year. I thought I’d try to set the ball rolling in 2012 with this post, the substance of which is lifted from the conclusion of a journal article that should appear in Legal and Criminological Psychology in February. I’ll post a draft version of the full paper in the resources page when I can.

Drawing on some thinking Shadd and I did last year for another paper (one that got away), the article engages with debates about different models of ‘offender rehabilitation’ and tries to encourage people working in the field to think beyond what I call ‘psychological rehabilitation’ — meaning the kind of rehabilitative work that aims to change the individual ‘offender’. It is also meant as a plea to look beyond the contemporary debates about two rehabilitation models: the Risk-Needs-Responsivity model (which has underpinned most programmes in UK prisons and probation) and the Good Lives Model.

Here’s how it goes:   

“Rehabilitation is a social project as well as a personal one. Whether we cast it in deontological terms as being concerned with the requalification of citizens, or in utilitarian and correctional terms as being concerned with their re-education or re-socialization, it raises profound political questions about the nature of (good) citizenship, about the nature of society, about the relationship between citizenship, society and the state, and about the proper limits of legitimate state power.

Though these political questions and concerns are ultimately beyond the scope of this paper and may seem somewhat abstract, they are in fact cheek by jowl with the practical challenges of making rehabilitation work. At least some of rehabilitation’s practical problems (and its conceptual weaknesses) come from the failure of some of its proponents and practitioners to engage adequately with these moral and political questions. Such engagement requires ‘psychological rehabilitation’ (which is principally concerned with promoting positive individual-level change in the offender) to articulate its relationships with at least three other forms of rehabilitation.

The first of these concerns the practical expression of Beccaria’s concern with the requalification of citizens; this is the problem of ‘legal or judicial rehabilitation’ – when, how and to what extent a criminal record and the stigma that it represents can ever be set aside, sealed or surpassed. Maruna’s (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 supporting offenders to change themselves can be sufficient to the tasks and challenges of rehabilitation and desistance, if legal and practical barriers to reintegration are left in place.  

But these barriers are not just legal – they are moral and social too.  A solely psychological conception of rehabilitation is inadequate to the moral and social offence that crime represents. In simple terms, doing something for or to the offender, even something that aims at somehow changing them as to reduce future victimisation, fails to engage with other key aspects of dispensing justice. Perhaps most importantly in moral terms, 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). Critically, reparation – and reparative work in particular — seems capable of fulfilling this function in ways in which rehabilitation cannot, perhaps principally because reparation seems better able to convey (not least visibly) that redress is being actively provided. Rehabilitation, by contrast, is typically a private and secretive business, incapable of responding to the late-modern re-emergence of appetites and demands for more expressive forms of justice (Freiberg, 2001; Pratt et al, 2005).

Reparation perhaps speaks to the insistence that moral demands have to be satisfied, and moral communication secured, before moral rehabilitation can be recognised (see also Duff, 2001). In simple terms, an offender has to pay back before s/he can trade up to a restored social position as a citizen of good character (McNeill and Maruna, 2010), or 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 with questions of justice and reparation.

Ultimately, even where psychological 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 personal reform, is perhaps the ultimate problem for rehabilitation in practice; it lies at the root of the hostile correctional climate that Polaschek bemoans in her paper [published in the same journal] and it lies behind the mistranslation, corruption and misuse of rehabilitation theories. The eminent sociologist and social theorist Zygmunt Bauman’s analysis of this broader social climate led him to the sobering if pessimistic conclusion that ‘…the question of ‘rehabilitation’ is today prominent less by its contentiousness than by its growing irrelevance’ (Bauman, 2000: 210).

Though we may demur from Bauman’s dystopian conclusion, I have tried to show in this paper how too narrowly psychological a conceptualisation and theorisation of rehabilitation risks and indeed invites the irrelevance of which he speaks. Until and unless rehabilitation can renegotiate its relationships with its moral foundations and constraints, with the burgeoning evidence base about the desistance process it exists to support, and with its social, political and legal contexts, it will remain vulnerable to its co-optation and bastardisation as a mere technique for risk management and public protection. Such a fate is itself the likely prelude to rehabilitation’s displacement by more certain and more constraining forms of social control. Ultimately, this is why a more fully integrated and interdisciplinary theory and practice of rehabilitation urgently needs to be developed.”

Comments always welcome!

I couldn’t resist a festive post, having just arrived home from ‘Scrooge: The Panto’.

The Canadian writer Margaret Atwood wrote a great book called ‘Payback’ a few years ago. In it, she deals with all sorts of issues surrounding debt (and credit). One of the many insights in the book is her realisation that Faust and Scrooge are mirror image characters. Faust sells his soul for self-indulgence; Scrooge redeems his soul by making good — by giving away the proceeds of his greed and selfishness.

Driving home, I couldn’t help but think what a role model Scrooge is — or could be — for the ‘criminals’ of the suites (as opposed to the streets); the ones whose love of money has been the root of all manner of evils that have befallen so many people in the last few years. Angry though they make me — angry as I sometimes am with myself — I have to hope that, like everyone else, they are redeemable. They certainly have a lot of paying back to do, that’s for sure… but then who doesn’t? But just like in the Sheffield desisters’ process described by Tony Bottoms and Joanna Shapland, there has to be a wish to try to change and the beginnings of thinking differently about oneself and one’s surroundings.

Let’s hope they make some progress in 2012. Let’s hope we all do.

In the context of serving as part of an independent Prisons Review Team in Northern Ireland, I have spent a lot of time in the last 18 months struggling with a specific and very challenging question: Can prisons promote desistance?

I suppose some people might not immediately think of the ‘desistance-supporting prison’ as a possible oxymoron; Michael Howard did reflect a certain strand of public opinion when he declared that ‘prisons work’; although if you can bear to revisit his 1993 speech to the Conservative party conference (and not many criminologists can) then you’ll find that he didn’t really define effectiveness in terms of desistance or even reducing reoffending. He had other objectives in mind.

People better acquainted with desistance theory and research will probably see the problem straight away (as will may people who work in or have been to prison). If desistance is about becoming more mature and responsible, about developing stronger social bonds and about a positive shift in identity, it’s not hard to see why prisons look like a profoundly unpromising context for desistance. They take responsibility away (and might even encourage immaturity); they break positive social ties (and enable new negative ones); and they confirm and cement criminalised identities. In important ways, the very nature of imprisonment itself is liable to frustrate desistance, and most desistance scholars agree therefore that we should use imprisonment very sparingly.

And yet, some people do change in prisons (and not just in the dramatic stories of people like Jimmy Boyle or Tookie Williams). For some people, imprisonment does become a kind of opportunity; a chance to re-assess the past and re-consider the future; a means of straightening out and connecting with services that might provide the sorts of post-release support that we discussed on the blog a week or two ago.

Some prisons seem to be better at enabling this kind of personal development than others. Looking at it in international context, for example, recidivism rates are much lower in Nordic countries (but is that just because their welfare provision is more generous?). By contrast, a few years ago I visited a prison in Romania where I found it hard to imagine how prisoners (17-20 in a cell, with minimal staff supervision or support) could think beyond how to survive the next few hours, never mind planning their longer term futures.

Perhaps less dramatically, but no less importantly, the work of Prof Alison Liebling and Dr Ben Crewe in the Prisons Research Centre at the Cambridge Institute for Criminology is revealing that in order for prisons to be places where prisoners feel able to develop themselves, five other other aspects of what she calls the ‘moral quality’ of the prison need to be right. These include:

• Bureaucratic legitimacy: ‘the transparency and responsivity of the prison/prison system and its moral recognition of the individual’
• Organisation and consistency: ‘the clarity, predictability and reliability of the prison’
• Humanity: ‘an environment characterised by kind regard and concern for the person’
• Staff professionalism: ‘staff confidence and competence in the use of authority’
• Help and assistance: ‘support and encouragement for problems, including drugs, healthcare and progression’

These findings — as well as those of desistance research — informed the attempts of the Prison Review Team in Northern Ireland to try to elaborate what features a prison system that supports desistance would need to have. Those interested in these questions can read the team’s conclusions at: http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/issues/prison/docs/2011-10-24_Owers.pdf

I think there are some important insights and ideas contained in the report — and would welcome comments and discussions about them here — but my experiences working with the team, visiting prisons, talking to prison staff and prisoners, still leave me convinced that when it comes to imprisonment, less is definitely more. Trying to create and run the ‘desistance -supporting prison’ remains one of the most challenging of tasks in criminal justice: but that’s no excuse for not trying.