Transcript Veterans and Villains: Oral History and Penological Research

Probation, Desistance and
Practice Virtues
Dr Fergus McNeill
Professor of Criminology & Social Work
Universities of Glasgow
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[email protected]
Supervising offenders
in times of insecurity
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Protection, blame, risk and insecurity
The paradox of protection and the risks of risk
Protect ‘us’ from ‘them’
Short-term (but secure?) incapacitation or control
Long-term (but insecure) change processes
The temptation towards public protection and
incapacitation
• Denying rights, denying change possibilities/opportunities,
denying redemption
• ‘Immobilising’ offending identities
Change is hard
• Not just because of the repeated and reinforced social exclusion...
Also the pains of the change process itself...
• ‘…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, p283)... The pains and dangers of social immobility
Some key lessons
about desistance
• A complex process, not an event, characterised by mixed
feelings and zig-zagging
• About re-biography (at the time or later) ; changing identities
(narratives); more than learning new cognitive skills
• Provoked by life events, depending on the meaning of those
events for the offender; subjective and individualised; sensitive
to difference/diversity
• Encouraged 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 (opportunities) as well as human capital
(capacities/skills)
• Certified through ‘redemption’ or restoration; finding purpose
in generative activities [constructive reparation ]
The process of desistance?
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
Long term committed compliance:
Good lives and good citizens
Making a necessity of virtue
(McNeill, 2006)
• Professional ethics: 3 approaches
– Principles, codes or virtues….
• Practice virtues implied in the research on assisted
desistance...
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optimism, hopefulness
patience, persistence
fairness, respectfulness
trustworthiness, loyalty
wisdom, compassion
flexibility and sensitivity (to difference)
Broader ethical issues
• Change, consent or coercion
• Duties and rights to ‘make good’ for both offenders
and society
• Probation staff as moral mediators
– Between the state, the community, victims and offenders
• An end (or limit) to punishment and some
constraints on risk-based decision-making
• Redemption and rights-based rehabilitation
Compliance and legitimacy
(McNeill and Robinson, forthcoming)
• Compliance mechanisms [motivational postures]
– Defiance (resistance, disengagement, game-playing)
versus deference (capitulation, commitment)
• Normative compliance [commitment]
– Attachment, legitimacy, beliefs
• Legitimacy as a resource for supervision
– Hard to capture/gather; easy to lose/spill
– Impossible to recover?
• Tensions between legitimacy with probationers and
with the wider public
Finding legitimacy
(McNeill, 2009)
• Serving the best interests of the probationer:
– Simon: I don't have any doubt the man was trying to help me, guide
me, support me – maybe prevent me going to prison, I don't [know] if
at the end he could have recommended prison, he maybe, you know –
trying to achieve, trying to help me, trying to guide me, trying to
support me, trying to advise me, everything… (Simon, p13).
– Andrew: I think he was genuinely concerned about me. I think he
took his job seriously and I think that the options he had, I mean it's
not like today's options where they can do all sorts of things with
you... But I think he genuinely liked me even though the big
vagabond that I was (Andrew, p7-8).
• Being liked, being cared for, being seen not just as who you
are but as who you might become (hope/potential)
Losing legitimacy
(McNeill, 2009)
• The pains of enforcement – and its longer term consequences
• Matthew: Rejection and abandonment
– Matthew: … Basically he put in the report that I never – I think I had to be
taught a lesson and to this day I still disagree with that because I got
remanded in custody to get taught a lesson. To me, what's all that about?
You're supposed to get remanded in custody for reports or for – i.e. "Lock
him up" and that was the story of my life, right through that "Lock him
up"….
• Peter: The injustice of enforcement
– I said "I've no done fuck all!" He said "I don't know but we've to come for
you" he said "you go in front of the sheriff at 2 o'clock today"…. So I went in
front of him, oh, and I said "Look – " and I said – “He doesn't agree with some
people and I'm one of them”, I said "I've no done any harm, I've not – I'll need
to have a chance of a job". He said "You can get a job in three months", he
said, and three months he gave me. That really fucking burst me – do you
know what I mean?... Because it was something for nothing, that was as far
as I was concerned, you know. I was really upset about it, I really was
flaming after it.
Professionalism, quality and
moral performance
• NOMS’s ‘Offender Engagement Programme’
• Sheffield research on the meanings of ‘quality’ in
supervision
– Inspection, quality assurance, accreditation, evidencebased practice
– Practitioner and probationer views
– Quality and effectiveness (utilitarian quality)
– Quality and conformity to principles (deontological quality)
– Quality and staff qualities and skills (virtue-based quality)
Phronesis
(Practical wisdom)
• ‘Whereas young people become accomplished in
geometry and mathematics, and wise within these
limits, prudent young people do not seem to be
found. The reason is that prudence [phronesis] is
concerned with particulars as well as universals, and
particulars become known from experience, but a
young person lacks experience, since some length of
time is needed to produce it’ (Nichomachean Ethics
1142 a).
– It is not just the general principles but the ability to apply
them in particular and challenging situations that is
required… and it takes time to learn how to do that (cf.
maturation).
Conclusions
• The impact of sanctions or the imprint of people?
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Being and becoming ‘good’ requires experiencing ‘good’
Models for ‘replacement selves’?
Penal values and penal vision: the imprint of compassion?
Normative compliance as a long term project linked to interactions
between attachment, legitimacy and (ultimately) norm acceptance
– Moral performance matters (Liebling, 2004)
• Is it right because it works, or does it work because it’s
right?
– Do we need instrumental reasons to do the right thing? Sadly, yes.
– But cf. Aristotle, the good man, and the good for man
References
• Bottoms, A. (2001) ‘Compliance with community penalties’, in A. Bottoms,
L. Gelsthorpe and S. Rex (eds) Community Penalties: Change and
Challenges. Cullompton: Willan.
• Digard, L. (2010) ‘When legitimacy is denied: Sex offenders’ perceptions
and experiences of prison recall’. Probation Journal, 57, 1, 1-19.
• Liebling, A. (2004) Prisons and their Moral Performance, Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
• McNeill, F. (2006) ‘A desistance paradigm for offender management’
Criminology and Criminal Justice 6(1): 39-62.
• McNeill, F. (2009) ‘Helping, Holding, Hurting: Recalling and reforming
punishment’, the 6th annual Apex Lecture, at the Signet Library,
Parliament Square, Edinburgh, 8th September 2009.
• McNeill, F. and Robinson, G. (forthcoming) ‘Liquid Legitimacy and
Community Sanctions’ in Crawford, A. and Hucklesby, A. (eds.) Legitimacy
and Criminal Justice. Cullompton: Willan.
• Robinson, G. & McNeill, F. (2008) ‘Exploring the dynamics of compliance
with community penalties’, Theoretical Criminology, 12, 4: 431-449.