Discovering Desistance

This blog comes from Martin Glynn, member of the Applied Criminology Group at Birmingham City University, and community activist. Martin has written a play based, partly, on some of the data he collected for his PhD thesis. This blog outlines that play.

Context

For men in both prison and the community, the model of being a father has disparate reference points, with no sense of direction for how fathering should be negotiated and managed. The on-going construction of the meaning of ‘father involvement’ in a child’s life is a core component of men’s individual agency that shapes paternal identity and behaviour.Accessing the ‘narratives of fathers’ is not simply a case of individual expression, but is more of a wider intergenerational need that can improve the role of disconnected fathers in their children’s lives. For incarcerated fathers this situation is made worse by the experience of being disconnected from their children on account of being ‘locked up’.

Desistance and Ethnodrama

During my PhD research on ‘black men’s desistance’ I identified ‘father absence’ and the inability to play an active fathering role played a significant role in hindering some black men’s trajectories towards their desistance. I also discovered the issue of ‘father absence’ as being directly linked to the desire to finding an ‘alternative family’ that increases both the involvement in gangs combined with the propensity to engage in criminal activity. So in an attempt to make some of the complexities surrounding desistance/re-entry for black men accessible to practitioners, academics, and community, I have written an ‘ethnodrama’ as a methodological tool designed to look at some of the issues raised in my research through a ‘performative lens’. An ‘ethnodrama’ consists of dramatised, significant selections of narrative collected through interviews, participant observation field notes, and journal entries. Simply put, this is ‘dramatising data’.

‘Reentry’ is based on data gathered during my doctoral research, combined with case study research on black men who had come into contact with the mental health system. Reentry is an ethnodrama that explores the barriers encountered by Mikey, an ex-prisoner re-entering the community after a long prison sentence. His conflict with an unchanged community, the family he left behind, the son he has become disconnected from, combined with the impact of his incarceration takes its toll, when Mikey’s re-entry back to the community results in him having a ‘mental breakdown’. Things deteriorate when Mikey is then admitted to a mental institution where he falls deeper into darkness.

However, by undergoing therapeutic intervention Mikey begins to reevaluate his life and explores a pathway towards his trajectory towards desistance. On leaving the mental health institution, Mikey confronts the barriers he failed to address prior to becoming institutionalised for the second time. Reentry raises pertinent questions around the on-going debates concerning ‘agency’ and ‘structure’ in relation to family, community, reentry and desistance.

Martin can be contacted at: msoulfires@yahoo.co.uk

hi,

Following two really interesting days in The Wirral, Claire and I are inviting people to post any reflections they have below (just hit the ‘reply’ tab). If people would like to email us thoughts, we can upload them for you.

A special thanks to Siobhan for making sure everything ran so smoothly and to everyone else for such interesting and thoughtful contributions.

Blog away …

Steve

Last night, I had the privilege of delivering the Anne Peaker Annual Lecture, organised by the Arts Alliance (an umbrella body representing arts organisations involved in criminal justice in England and Wales). My topic was ‘Art, Science and Desistance from Crime’. The audio recording and the PowerPoint can be downloaded on the Useful Resources page or here:

Audio: Art, Science and Desistance PowerPoint: Art, Science and Desistance

For those of you who already know about the (social) science of desistance, the first half of the talk doesn’t contain anything very new — other than a slightly different way of thinking about the implications of desistance theory and research for criminal justice policy and practice. But the second half of the talk might interest you more; in it I use some of the data from the evaluation of the Inspiring Change programme (a major programme bringing all sorts of artists into Scottish prisons a year or two) to explore different aspects of desistance linked to maturation, developing social bonds and changes in identity.

But, to be honest, the bit that was most fun (for me at least) was the last 10 minutes, where I dipped into my own cultural and religious heritage to think briefly about David (as in David and Goliath, or more to the point, David and Bathsheba) both as a desister and as an artist (he is credited with writing the Psalms). To cut a long story short, David rises from obscurity to become the King of Israel, but his passion for Bathsheba eventually leads to him arranging the death of her husband, Uriah the Hittite. All sorts of dreadful consequences flow from these acts, and David has to live with those consequences.

David’s oscillating moral status (from hero to villain to hero) and his process of redemption are what fascinate me — not least the way in which he captures this in song. Though Psalm 51 is his famous prayer for forgiveness, last night I used a few lines from Psalm 40 (which I think relates to a different part of his story) that seemed to me to link desistance and art in interesting ways.

First David has to wait patiently for the Lord (a secular reading might be that he has to wait in that liminal space that desistance or any transformation often involves; waiting for some kind of inspiration, opportunity, trigger, hook). Then ‘He (the Lord) inclines and hears my cry’ (so inspiration comes from somewhere or someone or something). ‘He lifts me up out of the pit of destruction, out of the miry bog. He sets my feet on solid rock’ (the inspiration helps the person find a way out of what ensnares them and provides a foundation on which to build a new identity; to develop a new life); ‘He puts a new song in my mouth’ (that transformation finds some outward expression — it has a social and a communicative aspect); ‘Many will see and fear’ (fear is perhaps better translated here as ‘be awed’ — this is perhaps the public recognition and certification of change that desistance scholars sometimes discuss, but also social acceptance and even admiration — the change is transformative for the audience as well as the author of it).

So, I ask at the end of the lecture: is desistance art? I think it is — in the sense that it involves transformative work; work that takes unpromising materials in unpromising situations and re-creates something good or something beautiful out of it. It involves new stories (or narratives), new songs, new portrayals of self and society, the sculpting of a reshaped life, learning to dance in a new way.

My final thought however was that art also plays another important role. It’s not just about personal transformation as art, or the role of arts in personal transformation; art also communicates and represents these transformative processes to others. It closes down the social distance between people by inviting them to share experiences and emotions, to understand (not just in the cognitive sense) their common humanity, maybe even to build the reciprocities on which ‘the good life’ depends.

For an inspiring example of this kind of cultural representation, take a look at SCCJR Artist in Residence, Jenny Wicks’ blog on the work she has been doing over the last year or so (http://punishingphotography.wordpress.com/). I defy you to be unaffected!

This guest post comes from Scott Lee Grant who is a registered criminal justice social worker and part-time lecturer in social work at Glasgow Caledonian University. Scott is interested in exploring the ideas of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu – in particular the concepts of ‘symbolic violence’ and unconscious participation in oppression, and how both might apply to the plight of ex-offenders trying to navigate their own journeys of desistence after prison. Below is a short commentary piece and starting point for further debate.

I’ve always been intrigued about the lack of community-level politics (NB: small ‘p’) in relation to the re-entry of ex-offenders following periods of incarceration. I’ve worked with many people who didn’t re-offend, yet struggled to formulate a new, some might say ‘better’ life in what others describe as a neo-liberal world; however, this world would appear to be a place where many ‘ex-offenders’ continue to face notable and growing levels of discrimination and exclusion (often tinged with more profound, subtle and subjective forms of oppression – ‘symbolic violence’). The REAL punishment for most ex-offenders would appear to begin at the prison gates.

Not only have we witnessed a transcarceration of penal practice in community sentences, but we also see a probable extension of structural oppression upon the potential desister at the point of liberation. We might take the view that the space between agency and structure is relational – that an offender is shaped by circumstances, but has potential to shape his/her life accordingly (within limits). And within that process, I would argue that some offenders might become unconsciously complicit in their own oppression; in other words – their disposition or ‘being’ might be shaped by the criminal justice system (or society) to such an extent that they simply acknowledge and accept their position as a dominated group without any reactive recourse to civil action to remedy this particular inequality.

Upon release, many ex-offenders return to familiar social worlds and familiar habits that might foster complacency by the very restoration of unconscious routine practices where exclusion, discrimination and oppression are normative threads that feature within the fabric of that particular social life. Perhaps practitioners, academics and other concerned parties feel rightly troubled by what is empirically exposed; but to do so we need the sociological skills to unpick, reveal and label the structural levels of oppression that ‘ex-offenders’ most certainly experience.

Conceivably, we might wish to re-direct efforts into providing ‘ex-offenders’ with tools required to view their position in society through a different lense – one that might prompt some degree of grassroots action and meaningful self-advocacy. Disability groups, the LGBT community, BME collectives, various religious organisations – all at some point reached a sudden, often acute understanding /realisation of their marginalised positions within society. ALL reacted vehemently to their respective locations on the outskirts of normative social life.

What, might you ask, would it take to ignite a revolt among ‘ex-offenders’ here? Is there something peculiarly British/Scottish/European about docility and complacency in these particular groups? Is the concept of user-involvement (mentioned carefully in recent Scottish Government documents about local authority performance management in criminal justice) merely tokenistic? Should self-advocacy be the way forward for ‘ex-offenders’? In essence, when should punishment end and ‘normal’ social life begin? When might the penal bite desist?

hi,

Well, it has been some six or so months since we started showing the film to people at the ESRC-funded seminars in Glasgow, Belfast, London and Sheffield – and we’re still being asked to attend showing in other places (which we’re happy to do, of course).

I’m curious – and I’m sure Claire, Fergus and Shadd are too – to find out how practitioners have used the film in practice (if they indeed have). I know that some people have shown the film to people in hostels or those they are supervising, but I’m curious to find out …

a) how practitioners have used the film

b) their reflections on how service users have reacted to it

c) how else the film could be used.

Similarly, if there are any service or former service users who have seen the film, we’d love to hear from you too.

Perhaps those who have seen the film in a practice-context (or even tried to use it and found it wanting!) could use this space to post about their experiences. If people have insights they’d rather make anonymously for some reason, please email me and I’ll post things unattributed (s.farrall[AT]sheffield.ac.uk).

All the best,

Steve

Like a few thousand other criminologists, I’ve recently returned home from Chicago, a city that at least has a claim to being the home of the discipline. I was at the American Society of Criminology conference, amongst other things showing and discussing the making of ‘The Road from Crime’. But despite all the fun of the conference (and a spectacular night in Buddy Guy’s Blues Bar) what will live longest in the memory is a visit to two prisoner reentry projects in Chicago’s West-Side.

Both of these projects seemed to me to be doing great work trying to meet the needs of the large numbers of (mainly) African American men and women returning to these neighborhoods, often after long sentences. Given that those with felony convictions in many of the US states suffer such profound disenfranchisement, their work could hardly be more important. In some states, former prisoners are barred from public assistance and from public housing; sometimes the exclusion extends to education and employment too.

So to support at the personal level the project of re-entering the community – of finding a place to stay, something to do, someone to be, somewhere to belong  — could hardly be more important. And the success of some of these projects in engaging community support for reentry is also a major contribution.

But all of this good work, done by great people, also begs some big questions. Chief among them for me — not just as a result of the visits but as a result of the conference — is ‘Whose responsibility is [successful] reentry?’

There is no question about who is taking responsibility in these projects; the former prisoners are, the staff are, the communities are. In some cases, the employers and education providers are too. These forms of engagement really matter; the conference papers that I heard on what is called ‘restorative reentry’ (that is, using restorative justice processes and practices to support people back into communities) convinced me about that. We can’t and shouldn’t do reentry without communities.

But, as my friend (and tour guide) Reuben Miller (a PhD candidate at Loyola University in Chicago engaged in an ethnography of reentry) pointedly asked, ‘Where is the [political] movement?’ These projects and these former prisoners are based in the same neighborhoods from which the Black Panthers emerged in the 1960s. But despite the racialised character of mass incarceration, there is no civil or human rights movement around reentry. As Reuben puts it, reentry seems to involve a kind of ‘carceral devolution’ of responsibility to former prisoners (to transform themselves); to their communities (to welcome back their own); to the third sector organizations that step in and mop up the consequences of mass incarceration.

Listening to the papers on restorative reentry, and responding to some tough questions about the emphasis on personal transformation in ‘The Road from Crime’, it became even clearer to me that desistance and reentry are social projects more than personal ones. More to the point, it is the State that punishes, so it is the obligation of the State to ensure that punishment ends (even on a strict retributivist ticket). And yet, the multiple forms of disenfranchisement that I mentioned above represent State-constructed semi-permanent exclusion and therefore State complicity in perennial, disproportionate and therefore immoral punishment. They also represent major structural impediments to the desistance from crime that we demand from ex-prisoners.

Meantime, back in the UK, Chris Grayling (Minister for Justice) announced on 20^th November his plans to ensure that all prisoners released from short sentences (of 12 months or less) should have access to an ex-offender mentor to steer them straight, as part of the ‘rehabilitation revolution’. That seems like a good idea but perhaps looks less appealing when trailed in the same speech that promises to make post-release ‘treatment’ mandatory, that aims to reduce prison costs rather than prison places, that suggests residualising probation around ‘high risk cases’, and that sees rehabilitation and reentry as best provided by private and voluntary sector bodies on a ‘payment by results’ basis.

This is not the place to argue about whether a deregulated market in the penal system is the best way to deal with the penal consequences of… well, all the other deregulated markets; but it is the place to question what ‘results’ Mr Grayling has in mind? The answer is that he wants to see reductions in rates of reconviction. There is, in one sense, nothing wrong with that… except that it misses the point. In the UK for too long we have framed resettlement solely as being about risk management and reducing crime. Effective reentry support can produce these outcomes but its real moral purpose (and remember this is on a retributivist ticket) is to see to it that state-imposed punishment ends when it is supposed to; to make sure that there is no punishment beyond the law.

Place that perspective in the wider context of the UK Government’s neo-liberal welfare reforms, and we see a bigger picture emerging here. It looks very much as if there are to be workers and shirkers in the rehabilitation and reentry business. Sadly, on both sides of the Atlantic, it looks as if it is the State (and not the ‘offender’) who is shirking the obligations that punishment imposes and the duty to end punishment.

For that reason, we need to build a movement that is about rehabilitation and reentry (and of course mass incarceration and mass supervision) as civil and human rights issues, and not just about how people and their communities can support one another to manage the consequences of the State’s dereliction of duty.

The Road from Crime documentary has been seen all over the world and now Avon and Somerset Probation Trust are showing the film on Thursday 22nd November 2012 at the Curzon Community Cinema, Clevedon, North Somerset, BS21 6NN from 10am to 12pm.  Professor Stephen Farrall will be speaking and there are creative performances that demonstrate desistance.

We have spaces available to attend this screening and learn more about why people desist from offending.  If you would like to reserve a place then you can contact Chantelle Smith to avoid disappointment.

Chantelle Smith, Desistance Development Officer

Email: chantelle.smith@avon-somerset.probation.gsi.gov.uk

When I first started hanging around in probation offices, which was in the mid to late-1990s as I prepared myself and the staff in the probation services involved for what was to become the Tracking project, I’d often encounter staff who implied or stated openly that they’d been involved in the service previously as users. Often they were men (but not always). I even had the pleasure of meeting Bob Turney once – one of probation’s famous ‘professional exes’.

Over time, as the Tracking project lengthened, and for other reasons also, I returned to many probation offices – not always the ones I’d been to before, but ones which were similar in many respects. Slowly (since it does sometimes take me a while to catch on) I detected a change in the staff. Gone were the people who looked as if or stated openly that they’d sometimes ‘been sitting on the other side of the desk’.

This topic (‘where have all the former-services users gone?’) was one which I broached during both the seminars for the film and earlier this week when I was showing the film and giving the Frank Dawtry memorial talk at Leeds Univ’s School of Law.

The story I’m getting is this – and it troubles me for all sorts of reasons: when the shift to embrace CBT, groupwork programmes OASys and so on was initiated, many probation services found (not sure how) that the sorts of staff who were best able to fill in the forms and run the programmes were those who had been educated to degree level. This meant that they shifted their recruitment policies towards this group (understandably), and over time, former-service users left (via natural wastage or, I suppose in some cases, embitterment).

If this is true (is it? – would others like to comment?) then it suggests a truly awful and quite unintended consequence of the shift towards CBT etc; the effective displacing from the staffing-pool of those people who are amongst those best placed to help others – namely former-service users.

I’ve heard a story similar to the one I relate above on at least two or three occasions now, and would be delighted if people could either put me right (i.e. explain how I’ve got it wrong) or add any further clarifications they see fit to make.

I’m glad to say that the peer-mentoring systems which are now being embraced appear to have seen a far greater level of involvement by former-service users than was once the case.

Either way, I’d greatly appreciate thoughts and reflections on the above.

Steve

Yesterday I had the pleasure of showing The Road from Crime to colleagues at the School of Laws at Leeds University (an event co-hosted by the School of Law and the Howard League for Penal Reform). I was fortune enough to have, amongst others Raymond Lunn (who appears in the film) and Sue Hall (West Yorks Probation Chief Exec) as discusssants.

After the film showing I gave the School of Law’s annual Frank Dawtry Memorial Lecture on the longterm impacts of probation supervision – several people asked for the slides afterwards, so I’m going to put these on the Useful Resources page.

Again, many thanks to all who came to the events yesterday and the staff at the School of Law at Leeds who made my trip such an enjoyable one.

Steve