Abstract
Stephen Farrall, Mike Hough, Shadd Maruna and Richard Sparks (eds), Escape Routes: Contemporary Perspectives on Life After Punishment, Routledge: Abingdon, 2011, 278 pp.: 9780415550345 (hbk), 9780203835883 (ebk)
This is a timely book. In a political climate where fear of crime, terrorism and the Other underpins punitive criminal justice approaches and pre-emptive risk-based governance, desistance research offers a voice to the marginalised and largely silenced voices of prisoners. Such research carries wide social, political and criminal justice implications. Appealing to a mainstream political perspective, some desistance studies have endeavoured to find out ‘what works’ in reducing recidivism. While this marks a progressive step forward from simply applying more and increasingly punitive sanctions to re-offending prisoners, a simple ‘what works’ approach has clear crime control and community safety implications which feature highly on most modern Western political agendas: if we must give prisoners a voice at all, then we ought to do so to prevent recidivism. The political attractions of this are obvious.
However, this volume does not focus exclusively on community safety, nor does it seek an uncomplicated list of ingredients for potential future desistance or re-offending. The conclusions reached are not straightforward and nor should they be; desistance is a complex process, more often than not marked by an oscillation between failures (relapse and re-incarceration) and successes in the endeavour to ‘go straight’ (Laub and Sampson 2001; Maruna 2001). It is driven by personal agency and unconscious processes, within a broader framework of structural constraints, institutional involvement and unpredictable contingencies that mark the lives of all offenders and ex-offenders.
Furthermore, the psychic and practical negotiations taking place both within and beyond institutional walls are by no means universal. Though there are significant parallels across time and space, the course of desistance varies across different historical, cultural and situational contexts, and in accordance with the differing structural positions held by desisting subjects. Hence a clear ‘one-size-fits-all’ criminal justice approach cannot possibly hope to capture the contested and messy realities of desistance. This is where the strengths of this book lie: in its attempts at capturing these seemingly insurmountable complexities through divergent theoretical frameworks and addressing the methodological challenges in doing so.
The book opens with Christopher Deacy’s theological analysis of Christian definitions of redemption and their appropriation by secular discourses in film and desistance research. Deacy argues that original Christian definitions of ‘redemption’ cannot be unproblematically superimposed into criminological theories of desistance as these involve divine grace and ultimate salvation through sacrifice of the innocent: ‘it is doubtful that any criminologist would want to seek common ground with a theory which emphasizes that the shedding of the blood of an innocent victim has healing properties’ (p.26). Anthropomorphic, post-Enlightenment concepts of redemption, popularised by film, are suggested as more appropriate, as these capture what it truly is to be human: frailties that lead us to do harm combined with the capacity to take responsibility for harms done and seek opportunities to repair the damage we have caused. The theme of redemption recurs in subsequent chapters. In Chapter 2, Anthony Bottoms and Joanna Shapland present an overview of the ‘Sheffield Study’ which explores the common phenomenon of sharp decline in criminal offending in the 20–30-year-old age bracket. Similarly, in the ‘Teesside Studies’ examined in Chapter 5, Robert MacDonald and colleagues trace how young, working-class people in a 15–25-year-old age bracket made the transition into adulthood and whether this led to lasting desistance. Even with differing emphases on the roles of individual agency and structural circumstances (cf. pp.48 and 138), the findings from the Sheffield and Teesside studies demonstrate that most participants had a genuine desire to cease their criminal offending, and had modest, conventional and working-class aspirations for their futures such as living in a small home in the local area, with their partners, and holding down a steady job (p.57; cf. p.137). In this they saw ‘purpose’ – only perceived as attainable through employment, relationships and parenthood (p.57; p.146). Despite good intentions, relapses were common. But like the redemption scripts in film, these reveal the gradual nature of lasting desistance and the human frailties exposed within shifting social and circumstantial contexts.
Though the role of the criminal justice system is not emphasised in these contributions, Bottoms and Shapland suggest that past offending practices and criminal justice involvement generally prove to be a ‘snare’ for the process of desistance (Moffitt 2006: 691). This is an argument shared by most in this volume. In Chapter 3, McAra and McVie focus on the Scottish youth justice system and sharply criticise ‘evidence-based’ youth justice policies informed by ‘what works’ agendas. They note that the scientific premises of ‘what works’ overlook both the long-term damaging effects of youth justice programmes to the youth exposed to them, and the earlier gate-keeping activities of the system – a crucial oversight if criminal justice involvement is a ‘snare’ for genuine desistance.
If early intervention by the criminal justice system does not ‘work’, then perhaps, as Mechthild Bereswill suggests, we should follow Liebling and Maruna (2005) in shifting the question to ‘what hurts?’ (pp.202–203). Through her in-depth study of two German youths, Bereswill’s contribution draws on the insights of Gresham Sykes regarding the ‘pains of imprisonment’ (1958) and Erving Goffman’s notion of the ‘mortification of the self in total institutions’ (1961), to complement an overarching psychoanalytic approach. She concludes that ‘nothing works’ in a criminal justice context, as imprisonment causes a ‘deep-seated crisis of both autonomy and identity as it thoroughly unsettles an individual’s subjectivity’ (p.203) – an insight to be repeated in later studies in this volume and which has a direct bearing on how individuals, even from dissimilar backgrounds, desist. Meanwhile, McAra and McVie conclude that the Scottish welfare ethos of the past ought to be resurrected to enable minimum intervention and maximum diversion for youth offending (p.84) to prevent net-widening, criminalisation of youth and the perpetual recycling of ‘usual suspects’ into the system. These conclusions are not astonishing, yet McAra and McVie also acknowledge that a currently punitive political climate renders untenable the ‘less is more’ approach, and as such, scientific, evidence-based discourses are privileged as ‘objective’ truths.
The same could be said of legal claims to ‘objective’ or ‘universal’ truths, as Anette Ballinger points out in her feminist analysis comparing official constructions of Louise Calvert (one of the few women who did not receive a pardon for the death penalty in the mid 19th century), with an unofficial autobiography written by Calvert herself. This chapter deconstructs the Law’s claims to politically neutral truths and reconstructs the alternative truths or ‘subjugated knowledges’ of women and other prisoners. Calvert’s candid autobiographical account provides an alternative truth which, in contrast to the simple picture provided by official narratives, illustrates the multifaceted struggles and negotiations that take place within an offending subject’s life. Further, Ballinger’s reflection on official constructions of ‘fallen women’ dips into post-structuralist feminist critiques of the law which criticise patriarchal power structures masquerading as ‘neutral’ truths that function to either pathologise or demonise offending women, blaming female offences on emotional, feminine whims, or a failure to live up to gendered ideals of womanhood as defined by motherhood, domesticity, respectability and sexuality (p.109).
Ballinger’s chapter shows that the richer tapestry offered within prisoners’ narratives must be properly heard in the interests of justice. More notably, this contribution adds fresh theoretical insights to a field that remains largely fixated on male-centric experiences of offending, reoffending and institutionalisation (Baldry, 2010). As observed by MacDonald et al. who also interviewed females in their initial Teesside sample: ‘compared with young men, the young women in the studies told a different story of … abusive relationships with male partners and family members, of sexual exploitation and street prostitution entwined with “heavy end” heroin use’ (p.139). Moving beyond a re-examination of what contributes to desistance, the rest of this volume is dedicated to the distinctive experiences of reform for diverse, previously under-researched groups such as sex offenders (McAlinden); offenders from specific ethnic communities in the UK (Calverley); white collar offenders (Hunter); and Nazi war criminals (Karstedt). These studies intersect in varying ways with the common experiences of desistance as explored in other chapters. However, the points of departure are more interesting. Anne-Marie McAlinden’s focus on sex offenders in Chapter 6 concludes with a message similar to others in this book: that punitive exclusion from the community (a fate that is specifically extended for sex offenders after they have served their sentence) is not effective for ensuring desistance. Yet, McAlinden’s work also ties together a critique of politically popular risk-based measures for sex offenders, the factors that affect desistance for sex offenders specifically, and the way forward through a ‘strengths-based’ approach found in ‘re-integrative shaming’ (Braithwaite, 1989) and circle programmes. McAlinden argues that such programmes are more effective at managing the risk of sexual reoffending than the punitive, risk-based agendas that were created specifically to do so: these simply push sex crimes underground or displace the risk. McAlinden’s attention to the reintegration and desistance of unpopular minorities is commendable in the currently punitive political climate. The same can be said of Adam Calverley’s focus on the desistance experiences of a large, Muslim ethnic minority in the UK – young ‘British Asian Bangladeshi’ men. The lack of research dedicated to the specific desistance processes of certain ethnic groups is astonishing given these groups are more likely to be subject to structural disadvantage resulting from broader discriminatory (and racist) practices in the Western world. Unlike most discourses around ethnicity and crime, this study ventures into the positive desistance habits of ethnic, particularly Muslim minority youth, rather than looking into their patterns of offending, criminalisation and over-representation in the criminal justice system. Calverley’s findings reveal culturally inscribed values of strong family ties that provide much needed emotional and practical support for desisters – both inside prison and out. Because of this, incarceration does not have the same negative consequences for Bangladeshi offenders as it does for other incarcerated groups.
Furthermore, Islamic values of forgiveness and ‘clean’, conservative living reinforced some of the common markers of desistance including structure through regular prayer, strict prohibition of drugs and alcohol (p.195), a different set of ‘clean-living’ peers, the desirability of marriage, and a broad philosophical observance of narratives from the Koran which provided a blueprint for future behaviours and redemption. Calverley points out that such religious and familial factors contributing to desistance are not ‘exclusive to Bangladeshi desisters’, however the tolerance shown by Bangladeshi families to their offending sons stands in stark contrast to the retributive policies so much in favour in the UK, having ‘much to teach wider society regarding its attitudes towards ex-offenders’ (p.199). However we need to question whether the same forgiveness would be shown by Bangladeshi families to their daughters. There needs to be some acknowledgement of the gendered, strongly patriarchal ideals embodied within a minority of Islamic cultures, and that daughters are often the bearers of family honour (see Idriss and Abbas, 2011) and hence might not be extended the same forgiveness by families as sons.
In Calverley’s examples, a future project of marriage and strict observance of Islamic religious practice offers hope in the present through a distancing from criminal pasts. Similarly, a future ‘project’ of a new ‘self’ – dissociated with a former identity driven by career and greed – could be traced for half of the white-collar offenders in Ben Hunter’s study. To introduce his work, Hunter discusses the existentialist endeavour of an ultimate future project (Sartre, 1958) that is based on an individual’s understanding of their past and present situations. Prison had given some of these offenders an opportunity to reflect on their ‘true selves’ (p.228), and hence equipped them with the raw materials to cope with future uncertainty – which seemed less threatening and simpler. However, an equal number of participants in Hunter’s sample did not see their future as a positive project because of the stigma attached to conviction and imprisonment. They saw the disjuncture between their pre-incarcerated and post-release selves as a negative shift in identity imposed by external forces over which they had no control. This is partially true because of the infinite structural and circumstantial variables to which individuals are exposed. And as Susanne Karstedt points out in her fascinating analysis on Nazi war criminals, the reputations and identities of former prisoners are also determined largely by the ‘normative and moral boundaries’ of the community to which they return. Half the participants in Hunter’s study expressed concerns that they would forever be tarnished by their criminal pasts and that this would have practical and social consequences such as not being able to find an ‘honest’ job, not being able to seek the company of former peers. This largely depended on the moral frameworks into which they would return.
Of course Karstedt’s analysis provides further original insight into desistance research by focusing on the unique cases of perpetrators who have committed crimes against humanity and who are imprisoned and released within the context of a transitional society. Karstedt traces how members of the Nazi bureaucratic and military elite, doctors, commanders of SS task forces and concentration camp guards developed different public reputations depending on the time of their release and the shifting public opinions around the holocaust at the time. What is interesting about these cases is that the recognition of wrong-doing and moral re-evaluation was not always present amongst the perpetrators of these war crimes. This could be linked to their positions of power, the genuine belief that they were doing the right thing at the time, and the fact that they were leading ‘respectable lives’ after the Second World War. As such it appears that the trials and mounting public censure over time did not appear to alter the offenders’ sense of responsibility for the atrocities committed: ‘[they] did not feel any pressure to morally re-assess their action, and could hardly accept or even understand the disrepute into which the trial[s] brought them’ (p.260). As such Karstedt’s insights into the post-release lives of Nazi war criminals brings this collection to an appropriate close in turning our attention to yet another group, but one which does not seek moral redemption in the various different ways other groups do.
The contributions in this volume demonstrate, at a more fundamental level, that existence is highly personal and that each of us, in our interactions with the world around us, constructs and reconstructs our ‘self’ in unique ways. This is why the study of desistance is such a complicated exercise – the variables unique to each individual experience slip from our clutches as soon as we take hold of them. This is true of offenders of any gender, or socio-economic or cultural background.
University of Western Sydney, Australia