This guest post comes from Kyesha James who is currently a senior at SUNY New Paltz. She majored in Sociology with a concentration in Criminology. She lives in Brooklyn, NY and is passionate about criminal justice reform and advocacy.

While watching the documentary, The Road From Crime, it dawned on me that there is a heavy stigma against reformed individuals trying to re-enter back into society. The documentary made me realize how much of a struggle it is for ex-offenders to come into society without any barriers. These groups of people are denied access to a lot of opportunities because of their background.  Employment is one of the main constraints individuals have; without income or support from anyone else it is hard to support oneself. This causes many to reoffend because they end up going back into their prior situation, like breaking the law again. Unemployment is one of the main reasons why the majority of individuals offend in the first place. So to be put back in that same situation upon release could create old negative thoughts. Besides unemployment, the word “offender” itself, according to the documentary, creates barriers for individuals released from prison because it puts them in a box. It is almost as if they have no citizenship, they have no rights and they have no freedom. It’s like telling a dog they are free, and then put them in a backyard. They are free to run anywhere in that backyard but they can’t leave the gate. Its false advertisement: if you want to let individuals free, we must take titles off of them, create programs that have full case management and pass a law that make demands on certain employers to hire individuals with backgrounds.

The individuals interviewed in the video discussed desistance and how it can have a positive effect on individuals. With desistance, a domino effect can be created; if you have people around you that are succeeding, it inspires you to succeed. For example, in the video Greg had Terry, who came from the same exact state that he was in, but Terry found a way out. This is what motivated Greg to believe he could do the same thing. This gave Greg faith that he could succeed.  This kind of motivation happens in the re-entry programs where there are workers who have been incarcerated and who have turned their life around. These employees tell their clients their background and how successful they are now. But they don’t show them the exact steps to get there. Also, everyone’s situation is different, so the reason why the worker got the job might have been because of certain credentials, compared to someone without any work experience.

When I first started interning at the Osborne Association reentry program in Poughkeepsie, New York, I was so excited. I thought to myself, “Wow I will finally be able to help people with criminal history find jobs.” This was easier said than done. As I have worked at  this organization for several months now, I noticed the difference between helping individuals find places that are hiring and getting them a job. The reentry program is a non-profit organization so it is hard to help these reformed individuals get on the correct path in life, financially, mentally and socially.  They do try their best and the effort is noticed but at the same time it takes more than this reentry program to prevent these guys from reoffending. The reasons I say this is because I have witnessed many guys become frustrated with the program due to their lack of success with employment. Many of them have a family to take care of and some of them have no way to support themselves at all. They have completed the classes the program have to offer, they have attended the job fairs that were recommended to them, and developed a professional resume but still have not received means of employment.

Listening to these individuals cry for help is uncomfortable to me because I realized that it’s not the program that can do much helping, it is the government and it is the employers who have the right to turn these individuals away because of their background. Why turn them away? Denying them a job and benefits only increases the amount of violence that will occur in society. These individuals will do whatever it takes for them to survive. There is nowhere for these men to go, especially if they grow up in a low-income community. The majority of people stay in these social classes because they become comfortable with their current situation.

The Osborne Association does a lot to help the clients there but they can’t provide the amount of assistance needed because they do not have a full case management staff. They are not able to support their clients in a manner that will allow them to progress and succeed after they are released from prison. They do not have a full case management program because of finances; this takes away from a lot of success within the program itself. Not having full case management means that they don’t have enough money and workers to help individuals with housing, health insurance, and just directing them to helping resources on an everyday basis, which an organization that has the funds would be able to. The problem with this is that there are not many organizations who have the funds that actually exist. The government doesn’t provide a lot of funds for non-profit organizations. Instead the money is being invested in putting police on every corner to surveillance the blocks and neighborhoods of low-income communities.

Many other reentry programs have the same problem; this means that a lot of the people who enroll in these reentry programs only get help being directed in the correct direction for employment, they are told who to contact for health insurance, housing, and direct assistance with forms but they are not taught how to. Many of these individuals who receive information about who to contact never contact anyone because they are intimidated. They don’t know how to fill out certain forms for housing and Medicaid. I wouldn’t say that reentry programs do not help at all but I will say that they need more funds then they already have. The government still has a lot of work to do with trying to allow ex-offenders a second chance in society. If they want them to change their lives around, they can’t come home to the same messed up government. This leads me to think, “Are these reentry programs really beneficial?” Now, I know there are a lot of people who think, “Well, yeah, they give a lot of assistance when it comes to people being released from prison and not knowing where to start.” But then my question is “What happens when years later after being released they are still at the same program, looking for the same employment opportunities?” I have discussed this issue with many of the clients at Osborne. The reasons why they are frustrated and many of their complaints were, “because I don’t have any money.” My question is “How do we make these opportunities available for them?” Could the government itself have a say about employers hiring ex-offenders? Or is it entirely up the employers?

What really hurts the most is seeing my siblings struggle. Every day I think about ways to help them become successful, but I don’t have enough resources to do so. I am still trying and will never give up on them because I do know that there will be a time that I can say they have finally made it. And when I say finally made it I mean they can finally say they have a job, they can finally say they have their G.E.D.  It hurts to see them struggle and what hurts me the most is seeing my brother, who was the most recent to come home out of all of them, get denied from numerous jobs and programs. He is 26 years old, he has a child, and he lives with my mom. Although he lives with my mom, he has no one to support him because my mom is a single parent trying to survive on her own as well. My brother was released thinking that he would get into a program called Ready Willing and Able in order to have some kind of income. When he was released he couldn’t enter the program because they said he had to be currently living in a shelter. He went to another program and they told him the only way he could enroll was if he was on public assistance. So then he called me to see if I could help him: I called numerous places and majority of them either told me he had to have his G.E.D and others told me he was out of the age range. This was very upsetting, because I could tell he was upset and getting frustrated. For one he had no one to show him how to fill out applications in order to apply for public assistance he also needed help filling out documents to even enroll into any of the programs that he tried to. What made me angry is knowing that I couldn’t help although I was trying to.  His parole officer finally got him into a program, but the program only keeps you off of the streets. They do drug testing and they teach him certain employment skills. But they don’t help him find employment and they don’t help him with his G.E.D. I say all of this to say that it hurts seeing people who are trying to change their life around be forced to stay in the negative situation that they are in. My brother has reentered prison a number of times and what made him go back to doing crimes were situations such as this one.  I really want to change this, I am working on ways to find out how this would work but I know there is a solution to this big dilemma.

I believe all of this could change if the situation is discussed more in society and if more people realized that the government is the solution and not a reentry program itself. It takes more than just these programs to reenter individuals back in society the way they need to be. It also takes a lot of time and patience but if we all work together as a community it can get done.

Last night I had the pleasure of participating in what may well be the strangest public engagement of my life at the Salon Project at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow. The Salon Project is a sort of ‘immersive theatre’ in which the whole audience goes backstage, gets dressed and made up, and then participates in a recreation of a Victorian era Parisian Salon — where the bourgeoisie meet for conversation and stimulation. Here’s what they did to me and my friends!

I think the idea of recreating the Salon and dressing us all up (as well as being an excuse for a fun night out) was to unsettle our assumptions about our identities and our society — and maybe about the idea of progress. My job was to talk for 10 minutes about ‘Punishment, Rehabilitation and Progress’… 

I’m a criminologist, so it may surprise you to know that I have spent the better part of my career and my life trying to work out how and why things get better. Firstly, living and working in a drug rehab, then as a criminal justice social worker, and now as a researcher, I’ve spent a long time either studying or trying to support progress in one way or another.

Much of the time, my focus has been on the sorts of personal progress that might come to mind if I use the word ‘rehabilitation’. In writing on that subject, I have described rehabilitation as a ‘fankle’ (which a French friend tells me translates from the Scots roughly as a ‘sac de noeuds’ or bag of knots). I’ve teased apart four strands in the fankle. In fact, I’ve been involved in making a documentary film about it, exploring how people travel ‘The Road from Crime’ (just Google it). Those of us involved reached the conclusion that rehabilitation is at least as much about social and legal processes of de-labeling and de-stigmatisation – of re-admission to citizenship and community – as it is about personal transformation. As well as personal change, rehabilitation is about social and political progress too.

However, I don’t plan to say any more about the rehabilitation of ‘offenders’ tonight; instead, I want to raise some questions about whether a nation – our nation — can be rehabilitated. If you don’t work in or pay much attention to criminal justice, you might well be wondering what exactly it is that I think needs ‘fixing’ here. Well, strangely enough, given tonight’s circumstances, our Victorian ancestors might have grasped my meaning immediately. Around the turn of the 20^th century, in the salons of this great city – or at least in the Glasgow Philosophical Society and in the City Chambers – Glaswegians were worrying not just about crime and delinquency, but about punishment itself.

Amongst others, Barlinnie’s reforming prison doctor, James Devon, and a local councillor, John Bruce Murray, were provoking public concern about the excessive use of custody for fine-defaulters. 43,000 Scottish people were received into prison on these grounds in 1904 (16,000 from Glasgow alone) at the rate of 800 per week; in Scotland at that time one person in 75 of the population was sent to prison that year; a rate twice that of England and Wales (City of Glasgow 1955, p9). Fifty years later, in a pamphlet summarising the history of the pioneering probation scheme that these reformers created, the authors recalled that ‘in view of the admittedly demoralising influence of imprisonment, the serious consideration of all was demanded concerning the welfare of the community’ (City of Glasgow 1955, p9).

Pause for a moment to take that in: imprisonment was not seen as the solution to the problem of crime; it was recognised as the driver of a sort of moral degeneration that threatened the welfare of the whole city. Fast forward a hundred years or so, and in 2008 we find the same debates recurring. The report of the independent Scottish Prisons Commission, chaired by Henry McLeish, ‘Scotland’s Choice’, similarly lamented Scotland’s apparent obsession with imprisonment. More specifically, it lamented our overuse of prisons, in that we continue to have one of the highest imprisonment rates in Europe, in spite of declining crime rates. And it bemoaned our misuse of prisons as overcrowded warehouses for the damaged, the traumatised, the troubling and the yet to be judged, rather than as places where we confine and rehabilitate the dangerous.

Now I’m guessing that – since you are into the Arts and you like dressing up – this might be a more woolly liberal crowd than most, but there may yet be some Daily Mail readers lurking amongst you, so let’s think a little about the moral aspect of punishment — and about the victim’s and the community’s legitimate demands for justice.

In fact, let’s get right back to basics and think about why offending is offensive. If human beings are to live in reasonably cooperative social groups, there need to be certain bonds of trust and reciprocity between us. Interestingly, this is one thing that evolutionary scientists and the major world religions seem to agree on. I rely on you not to violate my person or my property.  You rely on me to do likewise. When someone breaks these bonds of trust and reciprocity, we are rightly affronted and righteously angry. The function of punishment – at least as the famous French sociologist Emile Durkheim (who I suspect dressed a bit like this) argued – is to reinforce social solidarity; to remind us of the values we share, to affirm and express our collective conscience.

But here’s the rub: while imprisonment might work somehow and to some extent as a way of expressing and affirming our affronted sensibilities, for those subject it, imprisonment destroys the very reciprocities on which human society depends. Imprisonment by its very nature is a form of banishment and exclusion; but research also shows that it breaks down social bonds that are usually already fragile; that it disconnects prisoners from families and communities; that it diminishes rather than reinforcing any stake that the individual may have in conforming to social rules.

But it’s worse than that. As well as breaking social connections, prison does a kind of moral damage to prisoners too. Again, the Victorians were, in a sense, well ahead of the 20^th century evidence here. Charles Dickens wrote:

“I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay”.

Later scholars have revealed the ways in which imprisonment typically compels prisoners to close in on themselves; to defend themselves; to retrench; to withdraw. And herein lies the paradox of punishment: If our means of punishing diminish rather than enhancing the prospects of restoring and rebuilding trust and reciprocity, they damage us all; they damage us collectively. Sometimes we may need to imprison people to protect ourselves, but if we imprison too readily and unwisely, we harm society not just by ‘demoralising’ prisoners but by demoralising ourselves and our communities.

But it’s even worse than that… when we begin to withdraw from community, when we retreat into punishment and protect ourselves and out kith and kin with new forms and new technologies of security, we diminish the reciprocities on which our security ultimately depends. ‘Socio-spatial criminologists’ (who study the links between places, spaces and crime) suggest that cohesion – which is linked to both civic activism and social trust – and community capital – which is about the personal and inter-personal resources that reside in communities – are linked to low crime rates. Conversely, lack of cohesion and lack of capital are criminogenic or crime-generating.

So, to sum up our condition, we in Scotland rely overmuch on a form of punishment – imprisonment – that breaks down social ties, that damages the moral capacities of prisoners and that diminishes the personal and social resources that make us all safer. Our approach to doing justice destroys the reciprocities that justice should serve to restore.

But can we rehabilitate a nation? Let me finish my going back to the processes of personal transformation involved in rehabilitation. It turns out that people desist from offending as a result of becoming more mature, developing positive ties, and re-crafting their identities in constructive ways. Maybe the rehabilitation of a nation is similar.  Changing the way we do things – progressive social and political transformation — might rest on the same three things. Certainly, when it comes to punishment, Scotland urgently needs to grow up, to repair social relationships and to learn to see herself differently.

Today I was on the south coast, just into Cornwall (Saltash), presenting at a day conference of people involved in TurnAround, Devon and Cornwall’s Integrated Offender Management Project. You can download the slides below (or on the Useful Resources page):

Threats, Bribes and the Power of Persuasion

As the title suggests, I was trying (not for the first time), to link compliance theory, desistance research and IOM. But I was also trying out some new ideas that have been brewing up about reciprocity. A couple of times on this blog or via Twitter, I’ve asked the question ‘What good is justice?’, or perhaps better ‘What (sort of) good is justice (trying to produce?’

I’ve been tussling with this question for a year or so now; partly as a result of the related challenge from many people to say a bit more about what comes after desistance; what is life beyond ‘mere’ desistance supposed to look like. I have sometimes tried to answer that question in terms of people finding their way to better lives as better citizens in better communities (governed by a better State). I still think that’s important, but more recently, inspired partly by being required (for other reasons) to re-read around the concepts of social capital and (separately) Durkheim’s work on social solidarity, I’ve been pushed again and again back to this question about the positive good that justice delivers (beyond the minimisation of harms).

In a word, I think it’s about reciprocity. Interestingly, the importance of reciprocity is something that evolutionary scientists and the major world religions can agree on. Margaret Atwood’s brilliant little book on ‘Payback’ (2008) provides a compelling overview of the importance of reciprocity to human development and civilisation.

The failure of reciprocity is what makes offending offensive (it’s also what makes tax avoidance, excessive unsustainable first world consumption and, some might say, private education and health, offensive). To  a large extent, the point of justice is to reinforce  and restore reciprocities — to make it OK for people to rely on one another’s reciprocal respect. While that doesn’t say anything, in and of itself about how we should do justice (and punishment), it does invite us to come up with ways of reinforcing and restoring reciprocities that don’t actively harm people’s ability to fulfil reciprocal obligations. It is inherent in punishments that harm people — and that thus force them to act so as to defend their selves psychologically (like imprisonment) — that they damage reciprocity (at least for those directly involved), even if the broader message that they send might somehow succeed in expressing and reinforcing solidarity (as Durkheim might have said).

This guest post comes from David Honeywell…

I’ve struggled with an identity crisis since as long as I can remember. It’s what led me to act out my role as a ‘gangster’ while rubbing shoulders with the Newcastle underworld; it’s what made me carry knives because it made me feel I was a tough guy; it’s what made me tell people I was a university lecturer before I’d even graduated; and it’s what made me tell people I was a journalist before I had anything published.

I was so desperate to be accepted and to belong, and so disgusted about who I really was that I invented various personas.  The only time my identity crises made sense to me was when I was later diagnosed with having borderline personality disorder. Even so, I did in fact achieve all the above identities, eventually – except I was no gangster.

The whole identity problem continues to this day. But now, rather than being personally confused as I was before receiving psychiatric treatment, the problem is forced upon me by society.

It’s all very well achieving things and proving yourself on your journey to reform but the stigma of being an ‘ex-offender’ sometimes won’t allow us to fully re-integrate. So although I had achieved what I had set out to do, one part of society that was still putting obstacles in my way was the employment sector.  I may have become qualified to start a new career but it seemed it would never be enough.

My journey to becoming a reformed offender began in 2000 when I almost lost my freedom yet again. I had been released from prison in 1998 where I went straight to Northumbria University in Newcastle. Living a Jekyll and Hyde existence had become the ‘norm’ for me juggling my studies alongside my seedy underworld existence.

I never really settled and was hauled before Newcastle Crown Court on serious assault charges. I had been in court many times over the years, but this time was different. This time I had something to lose. I was a university student with prospects who, amazingly,  had somehow managed to get through my first two years.

Luckily I received probation rather than jail time so I left Newcastle for good in 2000 and moved back to Teesside where I finally began to settle for the first time since leaving prison.  I transferred to Teesside University and though it was to become a massive turning point in my life, it was also the most bizarre part of the journey. Stepping out from the doorway of Middlesbrough probation offices where I’d spent all day talking through anger issues with probation staff and other offenders, I’d look across to the other side of the road at the sign facing me saying, University of Teesside, with a growing pride inside me.

‘This time last year I was looking at going back to prison’, I thought to myself.  It was the weirdest feeling as I stepped out from the probation offices and into the entrance leading to the university ten yards away into what seemed like a parallel universe. How two worlds can collide is bizarre. Half of my identity was an ‘offender’ on probation – the other half, a postgraduate student where I felt I belonged; in a culture that accepted me.

I hadn’t realised it at the time, but your punishment doesn’t start until you are released from prison and for the aging ‘reformed offender’ there are two issues to deal with. Not only a criminal record along with all the prejudices that comes with that but eventually age prejudice will creep in too. In my case, I have three prejudices to juggle, the criminal record, my age and a history of mental health issues. But I will be eternally grateful to the probation services for giving me the nudge I needed. My time with them spanned eighteen months but it was the most cleansing part of my criminal journey being forced to face my demons and communicate this to a room full of people.

If there was ever an example where community sentencing works over prison, this was it and I can say I have experienced it, for had I gone to prison I doubt it would have done anything for me except make me more volatile. I would have re-entered society as I had before with even more criminal contacts and a thirst for revenge.  For my whole aspiration to become part of the underworld was born from the desire to wreak revenge on all those who had done me wrong in my younger years when I was too shy and too timid to fight back.

Three years into my studies my thinking began to change and in 2001 I graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Criminology, by which time my identity was that of a graduate. For the first time in my life I felt as though I was now a real person. I was now working towards a Masters degree which I gained in 2003 and, by the time this happened, I was a changed person. Once I had reached this stage I had a new confidence to achieve anything. I went on and achieved a City and Guilds in teaching but once again reality was to hit me like a sledgehammer.

I was the victim of my own success, forgetting that although I had achieved what I had, I would never really be allowed to fully reintegrate. In 2003, I was so excited after being offered a sociology teaching post at Middlesbrough College but my elation was short lived as my criminal record raised its ugly head again. And rather than facing another rejection, I politely turned down the job offer.

The following year, I gave up job hunting after too many rejections to remember. I realised that interviewers and employers faced with a ‘rap sheet’ were unable to make objective decisions; it was easier for them to just not take things any further – not to mention the growing amount of jobs that are CRB checked leaving you falling at the first hurdle.

That was why I decided to become self employed and, in 2004, I decided to try the world of journalism. I worked tirelessly writing and contributing articles for newspapers for little return except seeing my name in the press as a respected writer instead of in the courts section. This was enough to drive me on as it was another identity breakthrough.

It became addictive and in 2005 a feature article was in the York Press with subsequent articles in both now the Middlesbrough Evening Gazette and again in the York Press. In 2007 one of my articles about my grandfather’s heroics was used in a book, Time Past: The Story of York.

Then in 2008, I got my first paid writing work through Redcar and Cleveland Councils’ business enterprise team. I wrote press releases for local fledgling businesses they had funded and supported.  I had spent four years honing my skills and shaping my career though I was never certain it would actually happen.  In 2009, I launched a successful local newspaper, Coastal View, and in 2012 set up my book publishing company.

I am no longer bitter towards the system for alienating me; rather I am grateful for being made to jump ship. Had they not forced me into a corner, I’d never have discovered my entrepreneurial skills. My identity crisis is finally over and instead of being a fantasist and trying to prove myself to others while being ashamed of myself, I am now able to tell people I am an author, publisher and writer, knowing it’s the truth.

David Honeywell  BSc (Hons) MSc MRSPH
Author & Publisher
David Honeywell Associates Ltd/Nocton Publishing Ltd

Email: david.honeywell@yahoo.co.uk Tel: (01642) 275052 / Mob: 07907 511564

Steve Duncan is a performance poet who has been working with Chantelle Smith from Avon and Somerset Probation Trust. Currently he is working towards developing desistance based workshops for Criminal Justice agencies. Steve has set up his own blog (at www.blessheadsteven.blogspot.co.uk  – his Twitter is @BlessheadSteven and his email is blesshead@hotmail.com ) and has asked us to post this here:

When examining the life of an offender and those wishing to desist from crime, there are certain points that need very careful consideration.

We live in a society that likes to condemn the socially excluded. We tend to use language and labels that enable individuals to stay stuck in the guilt and shame of their wrong doings. In the pursuit of political correctness we are doing a great disservice. You wouldn’t dream of calling a heterosexual person that decided they wanted to enter a same sex relationship as an ex-heterosexual! What we need is a common language that affirms hope for the future.

An individual is no more an ex-offender than they are a future law abider. They have just made choices that society would deem unacceptable. To date the best terminology that we have been able to come up with is desister, but there’s still a slight problem with this. Whether or not the individual has stopped committing offences, it still has it’s definition based in crime. We are people with convictions who still have a right to dignity, opportunity and freedom!

I myself am a quote, unquote, ex-offender. I know only too well how the stigmas, beliefs and attitudes can compound the already negative self measures that we tell ourselves. Even for those wishing to implement real change in their lives.

Take for example a guy with several years, maybe even decades of entrenched offending fuelled with substance misuse, addiction issues. Consider the frustration of not knowing how to stop. Try to get a picture of a person who already feels like a failure. The core of their existence, shot through with different levels of guilt, shame, remorse and fear.

Imagine being trapped in a cycle that you cannot, in and of yourself, break free from. The constant battle of CRB clearance, employment, trying to go straight. Just to be accepted as a responsible and productive member of society.

It is indeed a struggle that requires deep levels of commitment, faith and perseverance. See, what I really need is hope; hope is a drug that every offender needs! Surely what we really want is to feel good about ourselves, to feel useful. What we really need is opportunities to do something different with our lives. Clearly we as a society and as professionals that work in the industry, have much to learn about the therapeutic process of desistance and how to help individuals move from hopelessness to hope and optimism.

I certainly don’t have all the answers; I am not a qualified sociologist or criminologist. I don’t have any letters after my name; I merely have experiences that I believe to be relevant, valid and potentially helpful to the cause.

It’s high time we realised that we don’t need academics to tell our story. We do however need them to help use make sense of our experience, to break down the struggle so together we can find workable solutions.

On that note let me point this out. There are clearly many of us that have managed to stop offending and go on to carve out successful lives for ourselves. Surely it stands to reason that we have much benefit to offer Criminal Justice practice.

I believe knowledge and experience is a synergy vital to effectiveness and professionalism. It may pay dividends to start taking our voices more seriously. It might be useful to take bigger risks in opening doors and creating employment opportunities for people with convictions to work alongside professionals in a paid capacity, qualified and unqualified! For the therapeutic value of one desister helping another is without parallel. Moreover, desistance taken on a new meaning when an individual realises his experience can benefit someone else. Why don’t we start our own support groups? Create spaces where we can support and encourage each other.

Finally I have every faith that with the steadfast commitment, determination and perseverance, we can together change the shape of the old age lie, once a criminal always a criminal.

I was honoured to be invited by the French Ministry of Justice to speak to what they refer to as a Conference of Consensus (a bit like a citizen’s jury, but with experts as the jury instead of laypeople). The report based on this and the presentations given last week are now available on the web:

http://conference-consensus.justice.gouv.fr/

The videos of the presentations are available here (for my own presentation click on “Partie 2 B)” on the righthand banner). For some reason the questions which followed the presentations – also given by Lila Kazemian – come before the video of the actual talks themselves:

http://conference-consensus.justice.gouv.fr/category/la-conference/partie-2-reflexions-et-preconisations/b-presentation-des-etudes-sur-la-desistance-et-sur-les-facteurs-de-risques/

For those of you who can speak French (sadly, I can’t) there was a preceding session (“Partie 2 A)”) which involved several people who had been convicted talking (I think) about how they made the break from involvement in crime. Rob Canton also gave a presentation (Partie 2 D) is where you’ll find the video of his talk).

I thought that this approach was a wonderful one. I’d love to see the English and Welsh Ministry of Justice hold a similar conference of censensus on this topic as part of their own much talked of ‘rehabilitation revolution’, but I can’t imagine they’d do it.

Just for the record, Martine Herzog-Evans tells me that the French government does not have to act on any of these suggestions at all, and may only decide to develop some of the thoughts aired.Martine has also blogged about this (in French and English) here:

http://herzog-evans.com/conference-de-consensusle-rapport-consensus-conference-the-report/

With best wishes,

Steve

An earlier version of this post first appeared in the Scotsman on 11th March, 2013:

Most criminologists agree that one of the drivers of spiralling prison populations in the UK and the USA in the last quarter of the twentieth century was the increasingly feverish penal politics associated with a bidding war around which party was toughest on crime (or more accurately, on ‘criminals’).

For that reason, many commentators have been intrigued by the emergence in the USA of a ‘Right on Crime’ movement within the Republican Party, championed by hardliners like Newt Gingrich (one of the candidates in the 2012 presidential primaries). The surprise is that these right-wingers are now advocating the shrinking of the prison population. Odd as this ‘Road to Damascus’ conversion to penal reform may seem, it has an obvious logic. These are conservatives who favour small state, low tax policies and who have awoken to the fact that penal expansionism (even where it creates private sector growth) violates both values. Influenced by these ideas, and by their financial crises, several US states not known for progressive penal approaches have recently seen unprecedented declines in their prison populations.

Informed by these developments, the Howard League for Penal Reform (in England and Wales) has begun asking UK Conservatives to take note. Last week, they published a pamphlet on Intelligent Justice that I co-authored with two English criminologists – Professors Mike Hough and Steve Farrall.

Intelligent Justice tries to advance us beyond the perennial and futile debate about the relative merits of custodial and community-based sentences. It responds in part to an earlier paper by Professor Ken Pease, published by Civitas, which argued in favour of custodial sentencing as an effective means of reducing reoffending through incapacitating people who offend. Being much more sceptical about such prison effects, we argue that at least some of the crimes notionally prevented by incapacitating prisoners may in fact simply be deferred or committed by others who fill the ‘vacancy’ their absence creates. More to the point, the total volume of offending by those incarcerated may be amplified in the longer run; prison has many perverse, unintended and adverse effects. When, as Ken Pease did, we try to put a monetary value on incapacitation’s crime reducing effects, these and other complexities need to be take into account.

But leaving the technicalities aside, Intelligent Justice also raises more fundamental questions about punishment; questions of purpose. Crime reduction, we argue, is not the only (and not even the first) purpose of criminal justice. Punishment imposes harms on citizens, so it must always be carefully bounded and governed by law. We may take different views about the merits of imposing pain on people for reasons of retribution, but most of us can probably agree that merely imposing pains without also seeking to restore people to good citizenship is both morally wrong and counterproductive since it leaves the whole community weakened.

For these reasons, we argue that the merits of sanctions should be judged on at least three criteria: their parsimony (meaning that the punishment must never exceed that which is just), their support for positive change and their effects on reintegration. Justice is not only about writing wrongs, it is about restoring relationships, about renewing reciprocal obligations, about reinforcing social solidarity. If our means of punishing don’t correspond to those ends, then our system of justice is in trouble – and so, ultimately, is our society.

Decent societies need people to comply with the law for normative or moral reasons (and eventually out of habit) more than because of fear or threat. Indeed, that is arguably one of their defining characteristics. As it happens, it is also a lot less expensive that financing a punishment apparatus that seeks to compel compliance but (if reoffending rates are any measure) is woefully incapable of doing so.

The full report can be accessed at: http://d19ylpo4aovc7m.cloudfront.net/fileadmin/howard_league/user/online_publications/Intelligent_Justice.pdf

Charlie Ryder has asked me to post this for him. As well as outlining why so many people are starting to feel uncomfortable with the term “ex-offender” he starts the tricky process of finding new terms to replace this one.

Steve

Why are the labels offender and ex-offender so offensive?

When I was released from prison in 1996, I had no idea that the label ‘ex-offender’ would be used against me for the rest of my life. In fact, it came to shape the hearts and minds of the many people who discriminated against me, as CRB checks saw my many application forms drop into HR dustbins.

I now run a mentoring scheme for people in prison. I believe it’s important to treat people the way you want to be treated. In my case that means unconditional love, compassion, kindness, forgiveness and a non-judgemental attitude. I feel ‘ex-offender’ is a permanent label based purely on the worst thing you have ever done and I find it deeply offensive.

For some time now, I’ve been asking others whether they find the term ‘ex-offender’ as offensive as I do.

Performance poet Mr Gee runs poetry workshops in prison. He feels the term “ex-offender” sonically invites the listener to focus on the word “offender” – the past as opposed to the future. He says, “This creates a tragic cycle where the individual isn’t allowed to move on. The term “ex-offender” doesn’t aid the rehabilitation process. None of us would like to be judged by the lowest point in our lives.”

Members of an online forum provided by Unlock, a national charity for people with convictions have recently debated this issue. Executive director Chris Bath told me, “Some people feel ‘ex-offender’ is a powerful statement of where they’ve been and proudly take ownership of the term. But most just want to be referred to in the same way as everyone else; Charlie the playwright, Karen the criminologist, Steve the fantastic dad”.

Like me, Chris feels a change of language is critical if we are to tackle the life sentence of stigma attached to even a minor criminal record. He told me, “One Work Programme provider I spoke to recently referred to ‘PG9s’, a reference to the way claimants are categorised. People used to talk about ‘blacks’ and ‘gays’. It’s a dehumanising technique. If it is absolutely critical that we refer to the characteristic, we need to think in terms of people with convictions.”

Author, blogger and professional speaker Shaun Attwood summed it up like this, “Ex-offender – the word offender has too much negative connotation. Person with conviction is less dehumanising”.

Emilia di Girolamo is a TV scriptwriter and producer who spent 8 years running drama programmes in prison. She told me, “I love that term ‘person with conviction’. I actually love the double meaning. To succeed after prison you need real conviction because the odds are stacked against you. I shall start using it myself. It only takes a few people and eventually works its way into the mainstream.”

Filmmaker and PhD student Deirdre O’Neill questions the use of the label ‘offender’ even more fundamentally. She suggests that, “Before we use the word “offender’ to describe someone who is in prison we should unpack the meaning of this word when it’s applied in this context. What and who are prisoners offending?” She feels that prisoners, mostly from working class backgrounds and let down by the system, are the “casualties of capitalism, the homeless, the mentally ill, the politically angry, warehoused away and punished. Then they are called offenders.”

In January I attended ‘A Workable Revolution’, a conference organised by the criminal justice group No-offence!. Richard Branson recorded a video for the event in which he used the phrase, “people with convictions”. So perhaps Emilia di Girolamo is right – perhaps we have started a rehabilitation revolution of our own.

Charlie Ryder

I thought people might find the following letter (to the Editor of the Herald) interesting. It’s a response to a lot of media coverage today of comments made by the Chief Executive of the Scottish Prison Service to the Justice Committee yesterday. I’m guessing the central points may be as important in other jurisdictions where a combination of cost cutting and populism might adversely affect prison regimes….

Dear Editor,

Like many other news outlets, today’s Herald carries a story about comments of the Chief Executive of the Scottish Prison Service, Colin McConnell in evidence to to the Justice Committee. His ideas regarding prisoners’ access to phones and TVs in their cells appear to have generated a lot of heat but not much light but both his comments and the adverse reaction to them perhaps need to be analysed in the context of evidence both about the experience of imprisonment and about the process of desistance from crime.

There are many research studies suggest that maintaining positive family ties is often crucial in supporting people to stop offending. It is obvious why that is the case. For most of us, the wellbeing of those that we love is a primary motivation to lead a decent life. However, one of the many paradoxical and counterproductive effects of imprisonment is that, in order to survive it, many prisoners (especially those serving longer sentences) actively distance themselves from their families so as to make the pains of imprisonment less intense. Rather than, as we sometimes imagine, compelling people to confront their crimes, imprisonment tends to force them to adapt and survive. Recent research – for example, by Marguerite Schinkel at the University of Edinburgh – suggests that while distancing themselves from the outside world may help people cope with life inside prison, it makes reintegration after imprisonment even more difficult.

Some readers, and judging by some of their reactions, some politicians might wonder why they should care about this. Leaving aside basic humanitarian principles, we ought to care because failures to rehabilitate and reintegrate affect the whole of society, not least by driving up reoffending rates. But if that isn’t a good enough reason for the more punitive amongst us, consider this: having phones in cells might make imprisonment more painful, by reminding prisoners of what they have lost.

So before bemoaning Mr McConnell’s comments as further evidence of ‘soft-touch Scotland’, we might want to resist our baser impulses, stop and think and try to develop a more mature reaction (much as we hope that prisoners will learn to do). In the penal system as in the economy, there is scant evidence that austerity works; if we want to see positive growth and development, we need to invest in it.

Yours,

Fergus McNeill

Professor of Criminology & Social Work

Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research

University of Glasgow