Well, the cameras are rolling and the whole team is very, very busy. Our film crew came over from Belfast to Scotland early on Tuesday morning and set straight to work — a 14 hour day of filming with some of our key characters in a windy west coast town. The development of the script (more of a schedule for each conversation really) carried on right up to (and past) the last minute… and we’ve all been emailing, texting and phoning around to think about what we are getting, what we’re not, what we need to focus on, how we can do it.

Our colleagues in the Scottish Prison Service did us a great service on Wednesday, allowing the crew access to Barlinnie where we continued the filming and had the chance to talk to and film both staff and prisoners, as well as some stunning visual images, of course. Thursday and Friday were spent back on the west coast capturing more visuals and adding some further interviews, before the film crew headed for home this afternoon. Next week, they head south to work with Steve and Raymond, as well as several others; the week after I’ll be working with them in London where we hope to connect with User Voice and Unlock, as well as some frontline probation practitioners. Then Shadd (always one for the more glamorous jobs) and the crew head off for the States, where we’ll be filming in DC and Baltimore.

It is very exciting but also, for crusty academics more used to the challenges of finding time to write, and to seeing that as our main mode of communication, it’s a big challenge to try to start thinking about how to make a film that can communicate what it needs to. What’s the right balance between dramatic versus mundane material? Between communicating complexity and clarity? Between what makes a compelling film and what makes a compelling argument?

Basically, it’s good fun, but it’s hard work.

Wow. Things are really starting to roll. Our director (Eamonn) is reworking the ‘script’ we sent him a couple of weeks back – i.e. thinking in more depth about what each segment of the film will try to ‘do’ and the message we’re trying to get out of it. We’re comfirming filming a various places and have a really interesting group of people lined up. I think we’re looking good …

Steve

So, we in Belfast woke up to a hearty laugh this morning with the following headline in the Belfast Telegraph: Man who tried to turn his faeces into gold is jailed

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/northern-ireland/man-who-tried-to-turn-his-faeces-into-gold-is-jailed-16066385.html

Apparently the judge in the case said: “It was an interesting experiment to fulfil the alchemist’s dream, but wasn’t going to succeed.”

That, sadly, is true and the results were admittedly catastrophic. I wonder, though, whether the man’s plan was any more delusional or dangerous than thinking that sending someone like this to prison for 3 months will somehow bring “justice” to this situation? Will somehow protect communities, deter other would-be alchemists, or turn this clearly troubled life around?

Maybe the laugh is really on us.

A while back I posted about an article that was coming out which draws on a literature review and some recent evaluation evidence connecting arts programmes in prisons with the desistance literature. That paper has now been published (in Dutch) so I am allowed to share the English version with you. I’ll put it on the resources page (once I have figured out how), but in the meantime, here’s the conclusion:

“This limited and brief account of some of our findings raises a number of issues in the light of the three literatures reviewed above. As we noted at the outset, given the complexities and difficulties of the desistance process, particularly for those involved in persistent offending who tend to have a wide range of background needs and to face significant resettlement problems, it would be unrealistic to expect relatively brief involvement in an arts project in and of itself to somehow ‘produce’ desistance. Indeed, the much broader project of trying to develop a desistance-supporting form of sentence planning (or offender management) within (and beyond) prisons is highly challenging, although several jurisdictions are now confronting exactly this challenge. The nature of imprisonment itself seems to run against the grain of desistance by limiting agency and responsibility, delaying maturation, damaging social ties (and sometimes building anti-social ones) and cementing criminalised identities. Although this would tend to suggest that the first principle must be to use prisons as sparingly as possible, where imprisonment is necessary the challenge is to create whole regimes (not just formal offender management or resettlement processes) that foster hope, motivation and responsibility, that maintain and develop positive social ties (and that enhance offenders’ personal capacities to sustain positive roles and relationships, for example as parents), and that help to build new pro-social identities and social networks and contexts in which these new identities can be embedded, nurtured and sustained.

The literatures reviewed in the first section of this paper suggest several ways in which arts-based interventions might usefully play a key part in this process. As we have seen, such interventions can help to build better relationships between prisoners and between prisoners and staff, they can engage prisoners in educational and personal development processes, they can help prisoners to recognise and develop their existing strengths and their positive potential (rather than focusing on ‘deficits’), they can build self-esteem and self-confidence, they can both use and encourage peer support and team or group work, and they can encourage participation in other forms of learning.

Putting this in the terminology of desistance theory and research, arts-based interventions offer more than ‘just’ the development of the skills of offenders; they may enable them to at least begin to think differently about themselves, their families, their relationships with their peers, and their relationships to the prison regime and the opportunities it offers. More generally, they may help prisoners to ‘imagine’ different possible futures, different social networks, different identities and different lifestyles. In and of themselves, arts-based interventions are unlikely to deliver the concrete, realisable sentence and resettlement plans which many prisoners will need to tackle the full range of needs, issues and challenges that they face; but they may help to foster and to reinforce motivation for and commitment to the change processes that these formal interventions and processes exist to support. They may also play a part in bringing positive social contacts and networks into the prison-based process.

In the end, to measure arts-based interventions and accredited offending behaviour programmes by the same yardstick may be to miss the point. Arts-based activities and interventions are not intended or designed to directly address specific ‘criminogenic needs’. For prisoners, just as for everyone else, they are first and foremost an opportunity to engage with our own humanity and with our potential for growth and development. In this sense, access to artistic expression in prison is, in some senses, as much a human rights issue as a pragmatic or instrumental one about best how to engage people in changing their lives for the better.  Nonetheless, our analysis of the literature and of our own data suggests that, whilst arts-based interventions may be neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for supporting desistance in and after prison, they can play a vital role in enabling prisoners to imagine and to embark on that journey.”

Actually, I’m back home this week, but had a really interesting week last week visiting Probation Trusts in Wiltshire, West Yorks and South Yorks. It was sitting in the first event listening to the Chief’s intro that I started mentally joining a few dots about where debates about desistance fit in with current developments within probation down south. Maybe people are starting to engage partly because of anxieties and demands (and even excitement) created by the reform agenda there. Even if I accepted a cynical reading of the new emphasis on professional autonomy and professional judgement (i.e. it’s all about de-regulating an emerging market), and I’m NOT saying that I do accept that reading, this new emphasis on autonomy is making people re-engage with some thorny questions about the nature of professionalism in probation.

Two classic attributes of professions are the (sole) possession of a distinctive body of knowledge (i.e. that which confers the basis of an exclusive right to practice) and of a distinctive code of ethics (i.e. that which represents and distills the perspective and values of the profession). By coincidence rather than design my two talks at these various events were about ‘Supporting Desistance: Reconfiguring Probation’ — i.e. a kind of contribution to the knowledge base for practice — and ‘Morality and Quality in Probation Work’ — i.e. a kind of contribution to re-emerging debates about probation’s values and the practice ‘virtues’ that seem likely to support change.

Of course, desistance perspectives also create some pretty profound challenges for professionals. Where they put the emphasis on the process belonging to the individual, and on the importance of discovering agency (or the ability to govern one’s one life) in the process, they seem to rub up against professional power — or attempts to put professional practices at the centre of the change process. As Shadd once put it (I think — correct me if I am wrong, Shadd) — the professionalisation of intervention threatens to steal the change process from the individual, just as Nils Christie once argued that the institutionalisation of criminal justice steals the crime conflict from the victim and the offender — rendering both as passive sources of evidence.

For me, this implies the need to rethink what professionalism really means… maybe that’s another challenge for this project to engage with…