Abstract
This article draws on the life stories of a friendship group of men in their 40s who offended together in their youth and early adulthood. By exploring these interrelated narratives, we reveal individual, relational, and structural contributions to the desistance process, drawing on Donati’s relational sociology. In examining these men’s social relations, this article demonstrates the central role of friendship groups, intimate relationships, families of formation, employment, and religious communities in change over the life course. It shows how, for different individuals, these relations triggered reflexive evaluation of their priorities, behaviors, and lifestyles, but with differing results. However, despite these differences, the common theme of these distinct stories is that desistance from crime was a means of realizing and maintaining the men’s individual and relational concerns, with which continued offending became (sometimes incrementally) incompatible. In the concluding discussion, we explore some of the ethical implications of these findings, suggesting that work to support desistance should extend far beyond the typically individualized concerns of correctional practice and into a deeper and inescapably moral engagement with the reconnection of the individual to social networks that are restorative and allow people to fulfill the reciprocal obligations on which networks and communities depend.
In recent years, theories of desistance from crime (exploring how and why people stop and refrain from offending) have been much developed, discussed, and debated, not just in relation to their various interconnected explanations of the process but also in relation to their implications for penal policy and practice. Underlying this developing scholarship lies an aspiration and an expectation that better understandings of desistance can and should enable the development of better approaches to punishment, rehabilitation, and reintegration, and thus the creation of safer and fairer societies.
In what follows, Donati’s relational theory of sociology is presented as a new theoretical lens through which to conceptualize processes of change. We illustrate this through an analysis of the life stories of a friendship group, revealing the centrality of social relations in the desistance process. Social relations are those bonds maintained between people that constitute their reciprocal orientations toward each other; Donati considers them key to understanding society and social change.
Social relations cannot be reduced to the influences of one person on another (and thus to interpersonal effects). Understanding how social relations work requires an examination of “the effect of their interaction [emphasis added] (the behaviour [sic] that none of the actors [individually] ‘brings’ to the relation, but which results from their mutual conditioning of each other)” (Donati, 2011, p. 126). Each relation has irreducible properties arising from the reciprocal orientations of those involved. Crucially, it is the practice of reciprocity (or exchange) that generates and regenerates the bond of the relationship. Thus individuals-in-relation reflexively orientate themselves to the maintenance of “relational goods” (such as trust, solidarity, loyalty, and mutual concern). Being in social relations produces these goods, which are reliant on enduring bonds. That said, social relations can also produce “relational bads” (such as domination, fear, and mistrust).
Importantly, Donati (2011) also developed a relational theory of reflexivity, arguing that reflexivity is relational insofar as it is shaped by the networks in which it emerges. Individual action is guided not only by individual concerns but also by the social relations that matter most to people. In this context, compromises are deliberated over and decided upon to sustain these relationships and maintain relational goods. People thus make reciprocal adjustments or modifications to their behaviors as an outcome of relational reflexivity. In this way, social relations can motivate individuals to behave in a way that they might not otherwise have done.
Just as interactions take place in a relational context, social relations themselves are embedded in a structural and cultural context. How reciprocity is enacted and what it entails will depend on the nature of the relationship, the form of social relation, and the social and cultural context in which it is rooted (Donati, 2014). The conditioning influence of the structural/cultural context works through shaping the situations of social relations and social actors; for example, influencing the accessibility of resources or the prevalence of beliefs that shape the relations in which people find themselves. This shaping operates such that some courses of action are impeded and discouraged, whereas others are facilitated and encouraged (Donati, 2011). Conditioning structures can also be understood as the sets of relational rules prescribing how people should behave toward each other according to the norms that the context prescribes—norms which the individual must negotiate reflexively and in a relational context (P. Donati, personal communication, July 13, 2011). So, social structures influence both individuals and their actions, and social relations and their interactions. But individual actions and relational interactions also produce outcomes so as to effect either structural elaboration (morphogenesis) or reproduction (morphostasis). In this context, desistance from crime represents a form of structural elaboration (development or change), whereas persistence in criminal behavior represents a form of structural reproduction (or stasis).
The study reported in this article aimed to reveal the interconnected contributions of individuals and social relations to participation in offending and to the accomplishment of desistance. By so doing, it sheds new light on the centrality of social relations in the desistance process. In the concluding discussion, given the focus of this special issue, we focus on some of the normative or ethical implications of the analysis for criminal justice policies and practice.
Method 1
Participants
The study involved the analysis of the life stories of a friendship group of six men in their 40s who offended together in their youth and early adulthood (Weaver, 2013). Table 1 provides an overview of the trajectory of their offending careers.
Overview of Offending Trajectories
Age at onset refers to onset of an established pattern of offending.
Age at desistance refers to the age at which an individual considers they desisted. It is noteworthy that both Seth and Jed offended again at a later date; they regard this as conceptually different from their earlier offending.
Participants were recruited using a method of snowball sampling; the researcher had prior contact with a member of the group. The six men were selected precisely because they were part of a “natural” peer group, and as such have not been selected from a wider pool or category of possible respondents. The inclusion/exclusion criteria were simply that the participants were known to the initial contact and comprised members of the group. Participants occupy a shared age range, and the central characteristics of the group include shared social and geographical origins as well as collective involvement in persistent offending behavior.
Measures
In taking not the individual but the social relation as a central unit of analysis, this study explored the relative contributions of individual actions, social relations, and social structures to the process of desistance. The data were collected using a qualitative, retrospective life-story method, which was deemed the most appropriate method for exploring the subjective aspects of individual and collective experiences and their interactions (Atkinson, 1998). The life-story interview involved participants in two to four interviews, which lasted an average of 5 hr in total, with the shortest lasting for 3 hr and the longest lasting for 8 hr. Interviews were recorded (with permission), fully transcribed, and coded into emergent and superordinate themes using the Interpretive Phenomenological Analytic method (IPA; Smith, Flowers, & Larkin, 2009; Smith & Osborn, 2003).
Procedure
IPA was selected as a method of analysis because it facilitates a finely grained data analysis, oriented to a detailed exploration as to how participants make sense of their personal and social world. The analytic focus is on the meanings that particular experiences and events hold for participants. The approach is phenomenological in that it involves detailed examination of the participant’s life-world in its own terms. It is interpretive in its recognition of the researcher’s engagement in a double hermeneutic that examines how participants make sense of their worlds (Smith et al., 2009). IPA is also idiographic in that it is particularly suitable for small sample sizes, which enable the researcher to analyze and reveal the experiences of each participant.
Themes were generated inductively during the analysis of the individual cases. The frequency with which each individual drew on key social relations prompted a theoretical analysis during the process of cross-case analysis, and it was at this point that the utility of Donati’s ideas became apparent. This remains consistent with the hermeneutic phenomenological underpinnings of IPA, which were reflected in the dynamic relationship between the comparison of individual life stories and Donati’s relational sociology; the latter provided a theoretical framework through which to refract the “second-order analysis” (Smith et al., 2009, p. 166). The process of analysis yielded four superordinate themes: the Relational Context of Offending; Experience of Punishment (for two participants only); Roles/Religiosity, Reflexivity, Relationality, and Desistance; and the Meanings and Outcomes of Work. It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss each of these themes as they manifested in and across individual life stories. Rather, in what follows, we present the recurrent elements of the change process as they emerge across the life stories to illuminate the individual, relational, and structural contributions to the desistance process.
This study examines the life stories of a small group of men in a specific social and cultural context, in a particular historical period. We therefore make no claims as the statistical generalizability of the findings to other populations in other places and times. Nonetheless, we suspect that analytical generalizability is possible; although structural and cultural contexts of individual actions and relational interactions will vary, the need to attend to the relational in understanding and supporting desistance seems likely to be universal. All names are pseudonyms.
Results
The Dynamics 2 of Desistance
The Group as Context and Interaction
The group (“the Del”), comprising sibling and friend relations, were born and raised in “Coaston,” a predominantly working class town in the West of Scotland. Various social histories of the era and area portray a dominant “macho,” patriarchal culture manifest in heavy drinking and interpersonal violence, and underpinned by widespread frustration and socioeconomic disadvantage (Craig, 2010; Damer, 1990). Reminiscent of Willis’s (1977) boys, the Del actively and self-consciously appropriated elements of an idealized configuration of hegemonic “traditional” working class masculinity (Connell, 2002) in their pursuit of status, respect, and social recognition, influenced by and responsive to their structural, cultural, and economic contexts. Their emergent gender identities and associated practices were interwoven with relational rules, influencing the kind of bonds generated between them and guiding the nature and form of their relationships, interactions, and actions, which included acquisitive and violent crime.
The frequency and intensity of their association with each other afforded them a sense of belonging, recognition, and solidarity, and transformed their relationships into stronger, more reciprocal fraternal relationships which served to ameliorate the marginality and powerlessness they experienced in other social spheres. Pahl (2000) argued that, characteristically, friends are viewed as freely chosen and the moral obligations they carry are less binding than those relating to kin ties. However, collectives comprising sibling and friend relations suffuse kin relations with the norms and expectations associated with the role of friendship, and vice versa, which forms a strong fraternal bond. All of the men interviewed had high expectations of their friendships in the group and were strongly invested in the maintenance of these relationships. The emergent relational goods of reciprocity, trust, equality, uncritical support, loyalty, and solidarity for each other occurred frequently across accounts, and manifested in specific expectations and behavioral obligations. For example, it was expected that you would support your friends if they were caught up in a violent incident.
Everybody looked after each other. I mean if I went out one night and got a doing, well Adam and the whole lot of them, Mark, Ben, James and all that would be out the next night looking for them, the people who set about me. If Adam got a doing, we’d be looking for them. Nothing ever went unanswered.
The group encouraged collective participation in behaviors that individuals might not normally have undertaken alone, motivated by fear of “losing face,” status, or the respect of their friends. The cycle of retributive intergroup violence to which this gave rise had the effect of perpetuating and exacerbating their collective offending, which incrementally led to increasingly restricted lives offering little choice or opportunity to be or do anything different (and hence to structural reproduction or “morphostasis”).
The group fragmented as a consequence of a violent and enduring intragroup feud, which escalated in frequency and intensity over a 2-year period. Some people developed alternative social networks rather than align with one side or another. In the context of enduring economic and structural constraints in the West of Scotland, and as a means to escape the escalating violence, a number of the Del (hereafter the “revised group”) relocated to London to seize opportunities presented by the construction boom of the 1980s.
Adam (not interviewed) was the first of the revised group to escape to London and to access employment in steel-fixing. In Adam’s case, this was informed by a reflexive intention to desist and distance himself from the “relational bads” (Donati, 2011) emerging from the feud. His resolve was underpinned by his emotional connection to his spouse and a desire to maintain their emergent “relational goods”; goods that continued offending and its outcomes threatened. Nonetheless, concerned to support his friends, Adam encouraged them to relocate and trained them in steel-fixing. Among those interviewed in this study, Jed, Seth, and Jay followed him to London, although others not interviewed, including the Smith brothers (Ben, Jim, and James) and Mark, also moved with them. Adam’s concern for his friends can be construed as evidence of his application of reflexivity not simply to himself or to his individual social mobility but to his relationships. Having been a leader in the group, he now exercised leadership in a different way, consistent with Donati’s (2011) concept of relational reflexivity. Reestablishing a revised and collaborative relational network in a new location facilitated the reemergence of the relational goods of social trust, solidarity, and social connectedness threatened by the feud, from which other ends, including new knowledge and skills, employment, and economic resources, were derived as secondary emergent effects (Donati, 2006).
While economic and social changes to their structural contexts (in the form of employment opportunities) were enabled by the construction boom, the recognition and pursuit of such opportunities were also an expression of their individual and collective agency. However, the development of the necessary skills in steel-fixing, and their capacity to access these opportunities and settle in a new area emerged from the mutual and reciprocal exchange of support and resources among the revised group. The changes in their conditioning structures were thus the outcomes both of Adam’s relational reflexivity and of the collaborative efforts and reflexivity of the revised group. The relocation offered shared opportunities for change.
However, the extent to which the move to London was initially apprehended as an opportunity for change varied across the group. Differing individual responses to these changes in their conditioning structures illustrate that the outcomes cannot be explained in terms of external forces exerting an exogenous or homogeneous effect; rather, they reflect individuals’ varying receptivity and response to these changes—responses that were reflexively mediated through the lens of their individual and relational concerns or priorities. For Jed, his initial motivation to abstain from offending was partly influenced by his desire to avoid London prisons where he had no prison-based networks that might ameliorate the adversity of the prison experience. But regular employment and a steady income also eliminated the need to engage in acquisitive crime, which for Jed, provoked a reflexive deliberation on the pros and cons of offending and the consequences of a jail sentence on the opportunities he had acquired, as well as provoking consideration of opportunities for an alternative lifestyle that had been previously unavailable to him:
I wasn’t planning on stopping getting into bother . . . I just started thinking “wait a minute I’m getting 5 or 600 pound a week here, I’ve got a cracking wee place to live, what the fuck am I wanting to get the jail for,” you know what I mean? . . . You could see the bigger picture, you know, and you’d start thinking, “oh I could make money down here without stealing it.”
Intimate relationships exerted a distinct change-promoting influence on the behavior of some of those in the revised group and their lifestyle. 3 Generally, the acquisition of new relationships and associated social roles and practices acted in conjunction with an increasing disillusionment with their previous lifestyles, and the threat that continued offending potentially posed to these roles and relationships, to their shifting identities, and to employment opportunities. However, these relationships, roles, and practices exerted a significant influence not only on individual behavior but also on the interactive dynamics of the revised group. The shifting priorities and concerns of individuals away from the group and toward their families of formation (and associated shifts in their behavior) exerted a constraint on the behavior of others, who found they had less support from their desisting peers for engagement in offending behavior. This reflected a shift in the relational rules in this new context, to which they responded by modifying their behavior, motivated by a desire to continue to support each other:
When I came out of [prison] we went down to London and [Adam] got me work and when we went down there . . . he’d stepped away fae [offending] and settled down with [Marie] . . . and he’d say to me about doing this or not doing that . . . It’s almost as if [Adam] knew . . . what sort of . . . pressures would come up . . . and he could help me overcome that.
Each individual’s receptivity to the influence of their friends arose from the reciprocal bonds between them; in turn, what emerged from their interactions, combined resources, and personal and relational reflexivity was a transformation in their conditioning structures and relational rules (morphogenesis).
The Meanings and Outcomes of Work
Living and working in a new environment afforded the revised group an opportunity to engage in a wealth of new experiences and an opportunity to connect to different people, which, as Jay implied, contributed to an enhanced sense of agency and the ability to imagine himself and his relationships and prospects differently:
Going to London . . . opened up a whole new world because I had been cocooned up in here in [Coaston], in my relationships, my friendships . . . when I eventually moved it was just as if the blinkers were taken away . . . I met a whole different range of people and I knew that I could move away from [Coaston] and the life I was in and do things I could never have done before . . . I would say that was definitely a big turning point in my life.
Across the revised group, working in steel-fixing required the development of employment-based networks of “bridging social capital” to access further work. Bridging social capital involves establishing new social relations; these ties facilitate the reciprocal exchange of resources from one network to a member of another network, and in this sense are linked to the development of broader identities and social mobility (Woolcock & Narayan, 2000). Such social capital was a critical and instrumental means of access to further contractual work for the group. One person would obtain a contract for work and, as foreman, employ his friends and associates to carry out the work. In addition to sustaining employment, the development of new social relationships through work, comprising a diverse range of people, “afforded a concrete way of enhancing one’s own identity as a respectable person” (Giordano, Cernokovich, & Holland, 2003, p. 311). Thus, members of the group developed constructive reputations as “workers,” which enabled access to further work.
Participation in regular employment at this stage provided the revised group with new weekly routines, new social relationships and employment-based networks, economic stability, and concrete opportunities for new experiences. Working together as a team became a definitive feature of the lifestyles among “the revised group,” which reinforced a sense of common purpose and which enabled the internalization of identities, both as individuals and as a collective, in which participation in work occupied a central place (Rhodes, 2008).
It’s not like you just had to . . . not see people . . . there was people about you that were wanting the same things, so that helped. We all . . . got to that point where we wanted out of it round about the same time . . . we all stayed pretty close and we were working together and living together at different times.
In the early stages, working together in steel-fixing represented an important means of reestablishing a sense of identification and belonging among the revised group, which in view of their shifting priorities, practices, and relational dynamics, further exerted a constraining effect on individuals’ offending behavior. While employment did not directly trigger desistance for the revised group, it assisted all of them to sustain it in the context of broader enabling shifts in their conditioning structures. In turn, these relations imbued their participation in work with meaning. The chains of meanings that characterize a given social relation are “the complicated tissue of relations between culture, personality, social norms” and lived experiences (Donati, 2011, p. 130). What emerged across the individual stories was the continuing centrality of the men’s internalized configuration of hegemonic “traditional” working-class masculinity (Connell, 2002) in influencing their expectations of their marital relationships and their associated gender roles, and thus the shape and form of this social relation.
That’s the way we were all brought up and that’s the way women see men . . . it was always your father went out to work and your mother done all the housework and the men had to just go out there, do your work, come in and fling the money on the table . . . You felt great then. I’ve done my bit.
For Seth, Jed, and Harry, in particular, the role of breadwinner or provider was, to varying degrees, a dominant component of each of their adult masculine (and desisting) identities—one that simultaneously provided a conventional means of accomplishing masculinity and social recognition. Employment therefore represents an important means through which these aspects of one’s identity might be realized and recognized (Rhodes, 2008).
However, the form and shape that a relation takes is not predetermined nor permanently fixed, but differs between individuals-in-relation and over time depending on how they personify and interiorize the relation. To illustrate, Jed’s eventual separation from his partner and their children, and thus the loss of this social role and identity, rendered his subsequent participation in work meaningless to him. The economic outcomes that had, in his late twenties, been a motivation to sustain employment no longer satisfied him; participation in employment came to represent nothing more than engagement in a purposeless and cyclical routine that generated money that he did not know what to do with. This suggests that an individual’s priorities and relational concerns have a significant bearing on the meaning and outcomes of work.
A significant constraint emerging for both Seth and Jed, albeit manifesting differently, related to the hard-drinking, hardworking culture of the steel-fixing industry. The pub performs an important social function as the primary social space for men in the construction industry, who are working away from their families and hometowns, living in crowded, often insubstantial, accommodation, and in unfamiliar geographical locations (Tilki, 2006). For Seth, while the hard-drinking, hardworking culture enabled the maintenance of social relations within his working environment, it interfered with his capacity to sustain direct family involvement and heralded his return to prolonged episodes of binge-drinking which placed a strain on his marriage. Similarly, following the conclusion of his relationship with his partner, Jed’s co-residence and association with similarly situated men in the construction industry contributed to a prolonged period of chaotic alcohol use that ultimately threatened his health and constrained his capacity to continue working.
Across the men’s narratives, the constraints and limitations on the otherwise constructive outcomes of participation in employment variously cohered around the degree to which employment created an environment of and resource for social recognition. Intensive association with a friendship group, however formed, encouraged collective participation in, or an amplification of, behaviors that individuals might not normally undertake alone, motivated by fear of losing the respect of their friends (or colleagues). The human need to mutually and reciprocally relate to other people “involves feeling connected (or feeling that one belongs in a social milieu)” (Vallerand, 1997, p. 300). For Jed and Seth, their desire for recognition (to fit in and belong within a given social milieu) generated constraints in other areas of their lives. Therefore, while the social relation of employment can enable or support desistance, the relational space and social places of work can manifest as sites of recognition and misrecognition that are more or less enabling or constraining of change.
Faith Communities and Friendship Groups
Following the fragmentation of the Del, both Jay and Evan (independently from each other) participated in drug use. Ultimately, their addiction and the lifestyle it engendered created the conditions that differently shaped and influenced their offending behavior, lifestyles, and subjective well-being. The pursuit of drugs became their primary concern. As an outcome of their increasing drug-related desperation, relational contexts, and lifestyles, both Jay and Evan became progressively receptive to their friends’ faith-based interventions and testimonies of change. Their internalization of the teachings of Pentecostal Christianity, influenced by their interactions with friends from the Del who had converted, ultimately shaped their identities, behaviors, and lifestyles. In turn, this reshaped the sets of relations in which they were involved.
In the first year following Evan’s conversion to Christianity and subsequent release from custody, Peter (not interviewed) and Jay assumed what might be construed as an informal “circle of support” in terms of socializing Evan into Pentecostal Christian values, beliefs, and practices, and providing a helpful and encouraging environment to reinforce his fledgling Christian identity. In so doing, this “helping collective” role-modeled Pentecostal Christian identities and generated the relational goods (of love, friendship, devotion, caring) through which this process of resocialization was enabled. The process was underpinned by Christian relational ethics that consign mutual responsibilities on each person for supporting and for taking responsibility for personal change.
I had watched their lives and knew they were different . . . for the first year [post conversion] . . . they were always with me night and day, people like Peter and Jay . . . we would meet together . . . they almost sort of mentored me and gave me good advice . . . they were very influential in the early days.
Religion encapsulates particular beliefs, values, attitudes, and practices that, in conjunction with the relational ties formed through religious institutions, create a new world, and thus shape the conditioning structures for the convert to inhabit (Rambo, 1993). In Pentecostal Christianity, converts refer to being “born again,” and this emerged as a dominant identity in both Evan and Jay’s narratives. The term born-again represents the “displac[ement of] the relationship one had with the world and a former self, the person in the flesh. The moral identity is then constituted of a different kind” (Bielo, 2004, p. 277). For Jay, this was expressed through his immediate initiation of significant lifestyle changes:
I stopped overnight hanging with all my pals but I didnae [sic] feel pulled towards them and I didnae [sic] feel I had to pull myself back from them. I just thought I don’t like what they are doing. It’s not right to do it. So I just made a conscious choice not to go there. I met a lassie a couple of years later and she said “It was as if you’d died” . . . and I said “Well I did die. I died to my old life”—and that’s the only way to describe it. When I became a Christian I stopped drink and drugs, swearing, watching the telly, offending, everything. I just stopped everything.
Jay’s internal changes in his beliefs, values, and attitudes were thus expressed in external lifestyle changes characterized by the relinquishment of what he had come to regard as his past sinful behaviors, in pursuit of a moral or “good life.”
Some scholars suggest that being “born again” can threaten male identity, as it requires abandoning behaviors previously associated with masculinity (Brereton, 1991; Gooren, 2010). However, van Klinken’s (2012) research suggested that Pentecostal Christian males redefine masculinity through the exercise of self-control, self-discipline, the resistance of temptations, and the assumption of responsibility for oneself and for others. Thus, in the process of being born again, “not only a new moral subject but a new male gendered subject is created, inspired by an alternative understanding of masculinity” (van Klinken, 2012, p. 225)—one connected to notions of leadership, whether within the family or in Christian ministry.
Discussion
Social Relations, Desistance, and Normativity
The social relations that this study focused on were friendship groups, intimate relations, and families of formation, employment, and faith communities. What these social relations have in common is that they all incorporate shared expectations of reciprocity that imply degrees of interdependency. Those social relations that were most influential in supporting desistance were characterized by solidarity and subsidiarity or a sense of “we-ness.” Put simply, subsidiarity is a way to supply the means of constructing “we-ness”—a way to move resources to support and help the other without making him or her passive or dependent. It allows and assists the other to do what must be done to realize his or her priorities or aspirations. Subsidiarity cannot work without solidarity which means sharing a responsibility through reciprocity (Donati, 2009).
While key social relations have the capacity to influence, enable, or constrain processes of change, it is the meaning and significance of the social relation to individuals-in-relation, and the emergent effects of their interactions, that are critical to understanding their contributions to desistance. Ultimately and crucially, desistance emerged in this study not as an end in itself—as some studies tend to imply—but as a means to realizing and maintaining the men’s individual and relational concerns. Offending became incompatible with these concerns.
In sum, the impact of a given social relation on individuals’ behavior is attributable to the bonds maintained between people that constitute their reciprocal orientations toward each other, the emergent effects of their interactive dynamics, the interaction with and influence of other social relations within which individuals-in-relation participate, and the chains of meanings, or relational characteristics, that a given type of social relation, as opposed to another, entails for individuals (shaped by the internalized cultural, class, or religious beliefs and the values they impute to it) who bring their own personal reflexivity to bear in a manner consistent with their ultimate concerns, goals, or aspirations (Donati, 2011). In simpler terms, our social relations shape our behaviors, our identities, and our sense of belonging. It follows that social relations have a normative dimension; indeed, Donati’s discussion of relational “goods,” relational “bads,” reciprocity, solidarity, and subsidiarity makes this explicit.
Where previous discussions of desistance have attended to normative questions, they focus either on the virtues and vices of desisters (e.g., Bottoms & Shapland, 2011) or on the moral qualities of professional relationships that can encourage desistance (McNeill, 2006; Shapland, Bottoms, & Muir, 2012). What is missing in these accounts is an appreciation and elaboration of the (nonprofessional) relational contexts of offending and desistance, and of how these contexts are suffused with normative concerns linked to the character and obligations of reciprocity in social groups. It seems to us that unless policymakers and practitioners engage constructively with these relational contexts, their efforts to influence individual behaviors are likely to be seriously undermined.
Of course, one of the challenges that faces criminal justice reformers is that both political and social reactions to people who have offended are often (and sometimes justifiably) characterized by anger and affront. Offending offends because and to the extent that it violates principles of mutual recognition, solidarity, and respect, and the reciprocal social relations that these principles should permit and entail. Responding to such offense in punitive and exclusionary ways is understandable and perhaps sometimes even appropriate and necessary. Yet, if punishment has a merely punitive or vengeful aim, or if it is simply incapacitating, it is likely to have the effect of fracturing relations and weakening or severing natural norms of reciprocity. Desistance is likely to be better enabled through processes and responses that are restorative and allow people to fulfill their reciprocal obligation, which implies reestablishing “the circuit of reciprocity” (Donati, 2009, p. 227).
Putting this another way, while it is clear that offending requires a normative response (to express and reinforce values, reciprocity, or solidarity), it is equally clear that there are many possible ways to communicate and affirm values. Most fundamentally, we can punish in ways that willfully damage individuals and their interests, or we can punish (or rehabilitate) in ways that elicit a more positive form of redress. The choices we make about and between these forms of penal power and the penal mechanisms we deploy in this respect are historically, sociologically, and politically contingent.
These choices also have implications for the legitimacy of processes of punishment and rehabilitation, not least where they aim to support desistance (McNeill & Robinson, 2012). Indeed, one of us has recently argued (McNeill, 2012, 2014) that—even in states that do retain a commitment to rehabilitation—we are too narrowly focused on supporting personal change, neglecting three other forms of rehabilitation: moral, social, and judicial. In isolation, personal change will struggle to secure desistance if that change is not also recognized and supported by the community (“social rehabilitation”), by the law, and by the state (“judicial rehabilitation”). Without these forms of informal and formal social recognition, we argue, legitimate opportunities (e.g., for participation in the labor market or in other important areas of social life) will not become available and a return to offending may be made more likely. In some cases, the failure in state punishment to attend directly to the need for moral rehabilitation (the settling of debts between the “offender,” the victim, and their community) may undermine social rehabilitation and leave the relational breach unrepaired. More generally, our argument is that these four forms of rehabilitation are very often interdependent and that if correctional services fail to attend to all four of them, they will reduce the likelihood of supporting desistance. The importance of social relations in desistance processes thus underlines the need to ensure that concepts of reciprocity, subsidiarity, solidarity, and integration must inform the means through which these four forms of rehabilitation are operationalized.