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.

Regular visitors may already have noticed two developments in the blog — one is the new page entitled ‘Documentary’ which gives a brief synopsis of the film we are currently editing; the other is the new visual images which should scroll automatically when you visit the site. These are stills from the filming — the recurring character is, of course, Allan Weaver, the others include Raymond Lunn (standing with Allan by a canal), some of Allan’s old friends, some new friends in Baltimore, and John Laub, a desistance scholar and now head of the US National Institute for Justice. These images give some sense of the journey that Allan takes in the film; we hope that they’ll whet your appetite for seeing more in the New Year.

New posts will be coming soon on ‘Prisons and Desistance’ and on ‘Four forms of rehabilitation’. Meantime, we are eager to hear more from practitioners involved in supporting desistance (in any context). If you work in such a role, please drop us a line ad share some thoughts about what does and does not work, and about what matters in supporting people to change.

Hannah Graham is currently finishing a PhD looking at existing and emerging ways of working with people with multiple complex needs (sometimes called ‘vulnerable populations’) in justice and health, particularly in offender management and the alcohol & other drugs sector. She also works as an associate lecturer in criminology and sociology at the University of Tasmania, Australia and is co-author of Working with Offenders: A Guide to Concepts and Practices (Willan/Routledge), co-authored with Prof. Rob White. Bren Marsh’s recent post inspired her to write:

Last week I attended a roundtable event at which lots of policy and practice people (and a couple of academics, but no ex-prisoners) were trying to grapple with some of the challenges of resettlement and reintegration — and what would need to change in terms of structures and practices to better support ex-prisoners in their efforts to desist from crime.

It was an interesting conversation — lots of pioneering projects were represented, and lots of practical problems were identified. We all recognised some pretty obvious ways in which we set up people to fail — like short term prisoners who often lose their tenancies whilst in custody (and sometimes lose furniture and belongings), leave prison with a tiny discharge grant and then wait weeks for benefits and months for suitable accommodation, while struggling to access health services perhaps having been de-registered by their GPs when inside, and who are unable to secure work because of their criminal records. Even where we do provide services to them, we tend to expect them, just having navigated the disruption of incarceration, to then steer their way through a maze of different services, usually offered 9-5, Monday to Friday, usually expecting to offer an office-based service, usually expecting the ‘client’ to make all the running.

Maybe that’s a bit harsh, but one person at the meeting tellingly lamented the fact that ex-prisoners’ needs are so ‘complex’ (referring particularly to women). Well, yes and no, I think. Yes, prisoners may have plenty of human needs, and those may have been unmet for a very long time, leading to all sorts of related problems and difficulties. But ‘no’ in the sense that they are the same human needs that pre-occupy everyone else.

It’s certainly complicated to try to meet ex-prisoners’ needs adequately so as to support their (re)integration into society, but maybe the problem is not that the needs are too complex but that the services are too simple. In a quite different meeting today, I had the chance to listen to a former senior civil servant who lamented and tried to tackle the way that government departments tend to develop silo mentalities. A bit like professions, or like academic disciplines, they naturally develop expertise in and become pre-occupied with their part of the business of government (or public service, or social science). The consequence is the all-too-familiar failure to deliver joined up government, or multi-disciplinary working, or interdisciplinary research. In resettlement practice that becomes the failure to meet people’s needs as they find them, to tackle their problems with them, as and when and how they experience them, to support them to find their own ways to flourish not just in terms of health, or wellbeing, or recovery, or desistance, or human development, or in family life, or as citizens, or as political actors, but in all of these senses simultaneously.

Most of us don’t live tidy lives, neatly packaged into discrete components that individual service providers can, well, service. We are a bit more complex than that… and we need access to and support from services than can meet us as and where we are, and as and when we need them. But have we the wit, the will and pockets deep enough to develop resettlement services that can function in that way? Imagine a 24-7-365, one-stop shop providing a multi-professional ‘transitions’ service for ex-prisoners. Imagine that ex-prisoners helped to design, deliver and evaluate its services. Imagine that they were both service providers and service users. Sounds risky? Sounds expensive? Perhaps… but maybe less risky and less expensive than the alternatives.

Filming over, Shadd, Fergus and Allan and I now find ourselves waiting anxiously whilst the film production crew edit and re-edit the material filmed. (It is a bit like being an expectant father, but with less swearing from your loved one and none of those green face masks).  

Still, this gives us time to start thinking about the next steps, which will be holding a series of seminars at which the film is shown and the audience (made up of services users, CJS staff, family members and so on) given a chance to discuss what they took from it and how we can better intergrate the insights from desistance into the criminal justice system.

And this is where you come in …

We’re looking to hold these seminars in a number of locations (most likely Belfast, Glasgow or Edinburgh and Sheffield – but we’re also hoping that we might be able to squeeze that budget so tight it pops out another seminar in London too – we are good at squeezing things, it transpires). We’d like people to start thinking about which of these locations is best for them. Dates are likely to be during the March to May time (we hope).

So, do drop us a line if you think you’d like to participate in the next phase; we’re all really hoping that as many people as possible with insights far more sensible than our own will be able to make it along and help us start thinking about how we make the processes of desistance easier.

Watch this space … things may get a little quiet for a while but we’re beavering away, be assured.

Steve