Coproduction,participation and empowerment: A participatory evaluation of a young care leavers project in prison

Introduction

In this practice note, we present the experience of conducting a participatory evaluation of a coproduced training resource created by young care leavers inside prison. We think this is worthy of sharing because it is unusual to coproduce anything in prison and arguably more unusual to have the participants lead an evaluation. The work has been carried out by a partnership of a voluntary sector provider, Nepacs, and a social research sector specialist, Barefoot Research, continuing the innovation in family support in the criminal justice system in the North East of England (explored in this journal by Hartworth et al., 2017).

The ‘Paving the Way’ project was developed and led by Nepacs, a charity based in the North East of England established as the Durham Discharged Prisoners’ Aid Society in 1882, working to support positive futures for prisoners and their families. Nepacs has always sought to promote connections between custody and community through the services it delivers. Over the past decade, Nepacs has grown and diversified, seeking to meet the needs of families at each stage of the criminal justice system – from courts into custody, throughout a prison sentence, and then ‘Through the Gate’ into the community. As new services have been established and matured, the charity has been struck by the inequalities and potential unfairness that those who already have established community contact are supported to reinforce and sustain those links, whereas those who are socially isolated in the community become even more so when in custody. Although Nepacs is concerned about isolated prisoners of all ages and categories, the focus of the ‘Paving the Way’ project on 18 to 25 year olds was to ensure investment in those people who potentially have the longest and most damaging prospects for serial re-offending. Thus, the project developed from an intention to deliver equitable family support services to all those affected by imprisonment, and not just those who grew up in standard family situations.

The context

Not everyone receives visitors in prison, and not everyone gets the support they need, both during and after their sentence, to enable them to turn their lives around. One particularly isolated group is care leavers, who are over-represented in prison (an average of 27% of all prisoners were in care as a child compared to 2% in the general population (HMPPS, 2019). There are many negative outcomes associated with growing up in care including a greater likelihood of contact with the criminal justice system (children in care were five times more likely to be sanctioned for an offence than children in the general population) (Department for Education, 2017). The reasons for this are numerous although in some cases may be related to insecure attachment (see: Bowlby, 1969). The additional barriers experienced by care leavers have been identified by both the Farmer Review (2017) and subsequent recommendations and the Taylor Review (2015) of the Youth Justice System. On an operational and experiential level, Nepacs found that for care leavers, a lack of support from close family and friends contributed towards a sense of dislocation from society, and this impacted their chances of successful engagement with the prison regime and resettlement post-release. They also found other common characteristics, which included: difficulties in managing problematic relationships, sometimes leading to further isolation, particularly in times of stress, e.g. coercion into gang affiliations; underdeveloped knowledge of rights and entitlements; and a lack of community support/practical knowledge on resettlement.

The project

The aim of the ‘Paving the Way’ project was to address those problems of isolation, alienation, lack of stake in society, undeveloped capabilities, e.g. reasoning and judgement, and the lack of a clear incentive to remain crime free post-release without ‘significant others’ in their lives. An important objective was for care experienced prisoners to feel connected to their community and have a sense of purpose, and to ensure that they have the resilience to enable them to effectively resettle and make positive choices about their future. Casework was delivered to care leavers in prison by a family support worker to identify and re-establish contact with local authority Personal Advisers, former foster carers, friends and siblings who have been in the care system and biological parents, if necessary and/or appropriate. In addition to re-building community links, a key element of the project was to support young people to coproduce a group work programme that could be delivered to other care leavers in prison, which would build peer support and offer essential life skills. Nepacs’ starting position for the creation of the group work programme was: we want to support care leavers, and we think the best way to do that is by involving care leavers from the very beginning of the project. Barefoot Research’s position was: if you are going to coproduce the training resource, it makes sense to coproduce the evaluation, which in research terms is known as a participatory evaluation.

Coproduction and participatory research and action

Coproduction is about making things together. In research terms it means involving those who would normally be the subjects of the research, in the entire research cycle – from design, to data gathering, to analysis. It represents a shift in the power balance which is inherent in orthodox scientific research and the subject/object dichotomy: research is designed by experts, using participants as data and conclusions are made, by experts. In participatory research, participants are fundamentally involved in the entire process who hold the decision-making control. Coproduction has its roots in Participatory Research and Action. Figure 1 presents some of the different names and types of participatory development, which was an export from research and development in the Global South in the 1980s and 1990s. Participatory research was initially an emancipatory approach, which emphasised self-determination, and increased critical awareness and understanding of socio-economic and environmental situations, leading to developmental initiatives.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

The different names and types of participatory development.

Participatory research and development was a reaction against Western ‘experts’ and their ‘scientific knowledge’ dictating the terms and practice of land use development approaches, which often created the poor and hungry communities that it sought to avoid, e.g. using Northern farming practices such as monocropping. There was a political dimension as well as an efficiency imperative. This gave rise to so-called ‘bottom-up approaches’ to land use development and resulted in techniques and methods such as Participatory Technology Development and Participatory Rural Appraisal. Local people were leading their own development starting with research that they were directly involved in. This reversal in power structures was highlighted by one academic who said:

The world looks very different looking down from a window of a Boeing 737 than it does looking up, through the millet stalks. (Howorth, 1998: 78)

Central to the idea and practice of participation is the notion of empowerment. In order to understand empowerment, we must examine the concept of power. Nelson and Wright (1995) divide power in participatory research and development into two components: ‘power to’ and ‘power over’. ‘Power to’ relates to the process where both parties (beneficiary and external agency) question their initial realities and both transform their understanding (Nelson and Wright, 1995). As a result of this interaction, the objective is to discover ‘more spaces of control’ (Giddens, 1984) where, although never powerless to start with, by developing confidence and changing attitudes and behaviours, they can alter the power differentials in their relationships (ibid.). This happens on three levels: on a personal level, where the individual [the care leaver] develops their own self-confidence for action and associated abilities; second is the ability to speak for themselves (or their group) to negotiate and make or change relationships; last is the ability to operationalise the realisation that group action is often more effective or ‘powerful’ than isolated action (Nelson and Wright, 1995).

‘Power over’ is about gaining political power, outside the individual, and power over access to decision-making resources and mechanisms. In the Freirian (1970) sense, this is the process whereby disadvantaged groups gain access to decision making institutions/instruments and their resources and services. The challenge is for the group to receive treatment as equal partners in such institutions, so they have long term access to resources and decision making (Nelson and Wright, 1995). This form of empowerment through stronger entitlements is the ultimate objective of a participatory project. The evolution of limited power, to ‘power to’, to ‘power over’ is the process which participation allows; empowerment to people [care leavers] allowing them power over the resources which affect them or restrict their development.

The participatory evaluation method

As a method, participatory evaluation relies upon those creating the resource being those who review both the process and the end result; it is the beneficiaries which hold the control. As such, our participatory evaluation took place within the same group of young people who were developing the training resource, with the exception that it involved an independent facilitator. In terms of numbers and group sizes, the participatory evaluation consisted of two groups: one of young men (of between eight and 12 participants); and the other young women (of between four and six people) in two Young Offender Institutions in the North East of England (these were the project delivery sites). It was within these two ‘populations’ over a total of six sessions inside each prison where the participatory evaluations took place. The emphasis of participatory methodologies is on lived experience and user-led prioritisation, and not sample sizes or sampling techniques; the control of the research is intended to come from within, not without. Facilitation is also important, as guidance and some structure is required and we were assisted by our facilitator from Barefoot Research who had conducted many participatory evaluations in the past. However, for permissions and quality assurance, the research received authorisation from HMPPS National Research Committee, which is required for all research that take place within prisons and/or probation.

The first stage of the evaluation was the creation of group ownership of the evaluation and the establishment and reinforcement of group control. This was done by establishing an open, trusting and two-way relationship between facilitator and group, these were fostered and strengthened by sharing experiences over repeated visits to the group. It was also done by creating an awareness of the potential agency of participants, i.e. as people who have lived through the experiences of care, they are able to use those experiences to transform their own and the lives of others; and by creating an awareness and understanding that in order to evaluate the process and product, a somewhat dispassionate and removed position must be aimed for by the group, i.e. they must try and be both part of the process and removed from it. There was significant discussion around these areas, where meaning was debated and explored, as well as the positionality of the facilitator, who took an active role in the facilitation of the group, but not on any formulation of content.

Once relationships and ownership had been established, the groups examined a number of areas in detail, including: reflections on the experiences of care; experiences and understanding of barriers created by growing up in care; discussions of entitlements and need of support; development of relevant measures and techniques of measurement to be used to attribute impact of the work; ranking and prioritisation of these measures; analysis of all data and experiences to date, fact checking; and reporting (done by researcher and verified by young people as a result of absence of resources in prison).

Towards the end of the evaluation, the young people conducted a critical analysis and reflection on the impacts of the work, both for them and for future participants. After they had identified the areas of impact, we used participatory voting to select their respective importance. The young people found the impact of the programme, prioritised by order of importance, to be:

Being recognised as a care leaver;

After the group meetings and tasks, the facilitator took the lead writing a final report, using the structure provided by the process. This was shared, discussed and agreed by the group, as were the potential interested audiences who should receive a copy.

Conclusion

Participatory approaches aim to empower participants, develop their capabilities and lead to change, which are similar to the aims of the final coproduced training resource. As researchers we can reflect on the participatory process and conclude that it was responsible for an awakening among many participants about their position as a care leaver in society. This is the first step in the process of developing a ‘power to’, as explained earlier. We also think that coproduction and the participatory approach allowed the development of empathy among the young people and a desire to help other members of their newfound community. These elements of empowerment and empathy coupled with new or strengthened entitlements and improved capabilities are the building blocks of resettlement and the reduction of reoffending. From an organisational perspective, ‘Paving the Way’ represents an important next step in practice development for Nepacs. The charity has attempted to remain accountable and relevant for services users through the use of surveys, focus groups, comments books, ‘you said, we did’ statements and through the use of a social media presence. None of these methods have had the same qualitative impact on the development of new services or resources as the intensive work developed through ‘Paving the Way’, nor have they conducted participatory evaluations in this way.

Prison is designed to be an isolating experience, where commonalities and shared interests are often over-ruled by the design and layout of the buildings which limit freedom of movement and association, and the ‘sentence planning’ expectations of the regime. ‘Paving the Way’ demonstrates the advantage of viewing people’s lives through a holistic lens and nurturing an insight into why they have come across societal barriers and how, with peer support, they can build new skills and perspectives which could help shape their future post release. The state acts in locus parentis for young people in care homes. As they grow into young adults, prisons have the same responsibilities to understand and assist those with care experience. Paving the Way allowed Nepacs to foster peer support groups and generate a sense of empowerment for young people, which appeared to be transformational in their attitudes towards crime and offending.