Why People Stop (Persistent) Offending...

and how judges can help?

Fergus McNeill Professor of Criminology & Social Work Universities of Glasgow [email protected]

Why is stopping hard?

• Backgrounds to and resources for change • ‘…I am finding out a great deal about myself. I am making new relationships and living in a world totally unknown to me. I love it yet there are times when I hate it.

I am torn between two worlds

– alienated from the old one and a stranger in this new one’ (Jimmy Boyle 1985, The Pain of Confinement: Prison Diaries, London: Pan Books, p80.) • ‘To the extent that felons belong to a distinct class or status group, the problems of desistance from crime can be interpreted as

problems of mobility

– moving felons from a stigmatized status as outsiders to full democratic participation as stakeholders’ (Uggen et al., 2006: 283)

Desistance Research

• Not ‘what works?’, but how and why people stop – Not teaching methods but learning processes • Conceptualising desistance – A process not an event – Spontaneous (fade out or burn out) and/or assisted desistance (helped out) – Primary and secondary desistance

Subjectivities, Narratives, Identities Age and Maturation Interactionist accounts Life Transitions, Social Bonds

Why supporting desistance matters

20 15 10 5 40 35 30 25 0 age 8 age 9 age 10 age 11 age 12 age 13 age 14 age 15 age 16 age 17 age 18 age 19

Age

age 20 age 21 age 22 age 23 age 24 age 25 age 26 age 27 age 28 age 29 age 30 5

One model of the process Giordano et al (2002)

1. General cognitive openness to change 2. Exposure and reaction to ‘hooks for change’ 3. Availability of an appealing conventional self 4. Transformation in attitudes to deviant behaviour

Successful social integration?

Some key lessons about desistance journeys

• They are complex processes, not events, characterised by

ambivalence and vacillation

• The involve

re-biography

(at the time or post hoc) ; changing identities (narratives); more than learning new cognitive skills • Prompted by life events, depending on the

meaning

events for the offender; inherently subjective, hence individualised,

sensitive to difference/diversity

of those • Solicited or sustained by someone ‘believing in’ the offender (or prevented by someone giving up on the offender?)...

Hope

• An active process in which

agency

is discovered and exercised • Requires

social capital

(capacities/skills) (opportunities) as well as human capital • Certified through ‘

redemption

’ or restoration (de-labelling); finding purpose in

generative activities

[constructive reparation ]

Supporting desistance 1

• Expect and manage

setbacks

, lapses and relapses • If desistance is an inherently individualised and subjective process, then approaches to supervision must accommodate and exploit issues of

identity and diversity

(Weaver and McNeill 2010). • The development and maintenance not just of motivation but also of

hope

become key tasks for practitioners (Farrall and Calverley 2006). • Desistance can only be understood within the context of human

relationships

; not just relationships between practitioners and offenders (though these matter a great deal) but also between offenders and those who matter to them (Burnett and McNeill 2005; McNeill 2006), and between ex-offenders and the communities into which they seek to integrate (Uggen et al, 2006).

Supporting desistance 2

• Although ‘offender management’ tends to focus on offenders’ risk and needs, they also have

strengths and resources

that they can use to overcome obstacles to desistance – both personal strengths and resources and strengths and resources in their social networks. Supervision needs to support and develop these capacities (Maruna and LeBel 2003). • Since desistance is about discovering

agency

, interventions need to encourage and respect self-determination; this means working with offenders not on them (McCulloch 2005; McNeill 2006). • Interventions based only on human capital (or developing offenders’ capacities and skills) will not be enough. Corrections needs to work on

social capital

issues with communities and offenders (Farrall 2002, 2004; McNeill and Maruna 2007; McNeill and Whyte 2007) and with

communities of ex-offenders

?

A role for judges?

• Problem solving courts

– ‘the notion of an impartial arbitrator is replaced with a caring, but authoritarian, guardian’ (Payne, 2005, p.74). – Oregon: Recidivism rates differed widely among judges, with reductions of recidivism varying from 4 per cent to 42 per cent (Finigan et al., 2007).

– A review of specialist courts in different jurisdictions commissioned by the then Department of Constitutional Affairs concluded that judicial monitoring of offenders was related to their success (Plotnikoff and Woolfson, 2005).

Judges, desistance and reintegration

• Wexler (2001) – Judicial involvement in specialist courts can promote rehabilitation by contributing to the ‘desistance narratives’ (Maruna, 2001) that help to facilitate and sustain desistance from crime. • McIvor (2009) – Exchanges that take place between sentencers and offenders in drug court can enhance change. procedural justice – the fairness and transparency with which legal proceedings are conducted (Tyler, 1990) - which confers greater legitimacy upon judges and increases the responsiveness of participants to exhortations that they should • Gottfredson et al. (2007) – Judicial review directly reduced drug use and indirectly reduced criminal behaviour by increasing participants’ perceptions of procedural fairness.

Discussion

1. To what extent should judges sentence for desistance?

2. How and to what extent should judges be involved in the ongoing oversight of sentences?

3. To what extent is supporting desistance (for example via review hearings) a job for judges? 4. What about retribution, denunciation and general deterrence? Is it sometimes just to pass sentences that we might reasonably foresee as frustrating desistance?

5. To what extent do victims and communities have an interest in desistance? Does what offenders do next matter to them?

To source references see:

• McNeill, F. (2009)

Towards Effective

Practice in Offender Supervision.

Glasgow: Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, available at: http://www.sccjr.ac.uk/documents/ McNeil_Towards.pdf

• McNeill, F. (2009) ‘What Works and What’s Right’ European Journal of Probation 1(1): 21-40, available at: http://www.ejprob.ro/index.pl/what_ works_and_whats_just • McNeill, F. and Weaver. B. (2010)

Changing Lives? Desistance Research and Offender Management.

Glasgow: Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, available soon at: http://www.sccjr.ac.uk/