Negotiation of user identity and responsibility at a prerelease conference

Engaging clients as users in social work practice

User engagement reflects a new policy agenda, but there is still a lack of common consensus about its meaning. There is an increasing recognition in government policy in Denmark and the United Kingdom that prisons should be supportive, empowering, and equipping inmates with the necessary skills and identities to strengthen their reintegration back into society (De Viggiani, 2003; Ramsbøl and Rasmussen, 2009). Led by a new rehabilitation agenda, governments have reopened discussions of the importance of prisoners' rights. In a broader context, these endeavors can be understood as part of a change in the distribution of responsibilities between state and citizen, and the state and frontline workers, and as attempts to engage the user. It has been argued that neoliberalism has shifted state power toward systems that manage and evaluate members of society at risk. Rose (2000) describes this development as “responsibilisation” in which responsibility is delegated to the individual, who is to self-manage being at risk and members of society are addressed as activated and empowered subjects (Clarke, 2005: 447). As a consequence, both frontline professionals (and not “the state”) and clients now have an increased responsibility for “planning, service delivery and client outcomes” (Slembrouck and Hall, 2014: 63). This recent emphasis on professionals' and clients' common responsibilities reflects a shift from seeing the “client” as a passive recipient of services to placing a greater emphasis on clients' active and empowered user roles in public welfare services. In other words, it shows a move away from welfare dependency, professional control, and the “bad old days of statist paternalism,” as well as the professionals' potentially stigmatizing definitions of users' needs (Cowden and Singh, 2007: 6).

“User engagement” is often used synonymously with “user participation” and “user involvement,” referring to the active involvement of a client (user) in the process of receiving services. The empowerment concept is closely related to user engagement in two ways: people may need to be empowered in order to participate or be empowered through participation (Adams, 2008). Thus, empowerment may be conceived of as both a goal and a means to an end. As a generic concept, empowerment can be ascribed to all aspects of social work directed toward liberating, facilitating, helping, and enabling people to take or to choose to take control of and decide which factors are important in their lives (Adams, 2008). Criminal Justice Policy has introduced empowerment as a legal concept in assuming that making offenders active subjects in their rehabilitation process will reduce the risk of them reoffending. Beresford and Croft (2004) are sceptical of this general development, pointing out that failure to empower the client may result in further social marginalization.

A review of the existing literature on user engagement of involuntary clients (Smith et al., 2012) concludes that it only becomes possible to engage clients in relations built around trust, communication, and mutual understanding negotiated in everyday contact. Furthermore, dominant practice models for social work point to active listening and empathy as the key to obtaining trust and cooperation. The critics point out that these models were originally developed for work with voluntary clients, and believe that involuntary clients may therefore respond with resistance and uncooperativeness (De Jong and Berg, 2001). Others argue that engaging users may result in a tension where the client's need for support and intervention is balanced against the requirements of the welfare system. Turning clients into self-reliant, rational, and responsible users of social services and autonomous members of society may therefore not be an easy task (Liebenberg et al., 2013). Responsibilization is thus somehow a paradoxical strategy in involuntary settings, as is the expectation that the inmate's identity can be reconstructed and declientificated (Messmer and Hitzler, 2011). However, not all social work research categorizes clients' resistance as “non-behaving,” as some conceive it as reflecting them being “strong and empowered with a right to advocate themselves” (Payne, 1997). Interprofessional collaboration is central to the process of empowering clients, but in practice this may be a highly complex task, due, for instance, to clients having few actual choices or limited insight into the existing system of social services and being in an involuntary situation and as noted in Juhila et al. (2014), service choices are often both negotiated as “shared decision making,” but do also contain elements of paternalist control. While user engagement and empowerment have been theorized extensively as practices of responsibilization in prisons and conceived as top-down strategies, little is known about subject positions in actual everyday encounters (Moore and Hiray, 2014). This article thus intends to bring about further empirical knowledge about user engagement.

Focus on identity negotiation in interaction

The analysis draws on discursive social psychology (Wetherell, 1998), suggesting that constructions of identity are relational and located in language and discourses. People make use of different discursive repertoires to construct different versions and evaluations of participants and events. We looked for variability in the accounts and formulations that may represent contradictory or inconsistent versions of the inmate, his character, capabilities, and responsibilities (Potter and Wetherell, 1987). Our approach to identity construction is basically ethnomethodological and inspired by work recently published in a special issue of Qualitative Social Work (Hitzler, 2011; Juhila and Abrams, 2011; Solberg, 2011) and Weinberg (2014). We understand identities as socially constructed and consequently as variable and shifting when displayed in interactions. Thus, we focus on “identity as action” (Juhila and Abrams, 2011) and on how the professionals and the inmate both construct, negotiate, resist, and make use of the identity categories and the responsibilities connected to these categories. In this perspective, the inmate is not seen as passively shaped by objectifying abstract discourses in talk. On the contrary, the participants are seen as using available discourses actively as flexible resources through which they position themselves and are positioned by the other participants as part of a social categorization process. The analysis focuses both on the inmate's reactions to and actions toward the professionals' and parents' questions and explicit interpretations of the inmate's problems and suggestions for future assessment. Thereby, and in a context in which professional explicitly regard user engagement as a central aim, we want to illustrate the interactional dynamics when different identities are performed in talk.

The research setting and the empirical material

The empirical analysis is based on a prerelease conference that took place in a prison with participants from the prison staff and various welfare service offices, a 24-year-old inmate, Simon, and his parents. The setup of the conference was based on a government project, “Successful Release” (God Løsladelse; Ramsbøl and Rasmussen, 2009), which advocates a method of cooperation between the prison services and local authorities. The prerelease conference is viewed as a crucial element in securing inmates' rights to services and support with regard to welfare and health problems. The idea of a “Successful Release” is that, through the cross-sector cooperation between professionals, each inmate will have an individually tailored action plan to support their transition from prison back into society, and to ensure continuity in the reentry process through a coordinated effort. In short, the aim is that “nobody is released back onto the streets” (Ramsbøl and Rasmussen, 2009: 5). Thus, “Successful Release” draws on the principles of the “Housing First approach” (Tsemberis, 2010) according to which housing and individual social support constitute the most important stabilizing factors for the individual's rehabilitation. This approach places emphasis on the views of inmates as part of service planning and is inspired by psychiatric rehabilitation, harm reduction, the consumer movement, and recovery-oriented practice (Tsemberis, 2010).

In Denmark, however, a prerelease conference is not mandatory. ¹ In our case, according to Simon's prison-based social worker, the main reason for organizing the conference was that he suffers from attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Therefore, the diagnosis gave access to more professional attention and support than would normally be the case. The prerelease conference is comparable with care planning conferences in social work, where professionals from different institutions negotiate a client's situation and are involved in group decision making (Hitzler, 2011). Clients and their family members often participate in such a conference, as in our case where the inmate's parents were present as “a third party.”

Sources of data

The empirical material analyzed constitutes part of a larger body of qualitative material collected in an institutional ethnographic study of the encounter between the Prison and Probation Service and inmates diagnosed with ADHD (Berger, 2013). This material includes field observations, focus group interviews with staff, and individual interviews with inmates collected from January 2011 to September 2012 in the Prison and Probation Service in Denmark. The primary material used in the present analysis is a verbatim transcription of a digital recording of a 109 minutes long prerelease conference. In addition, we had access to the action plans for Simon, and the first author conducted a short preconference interview with the social worker who initiated the conference. The conference was conducted in Danish but has been translated for use in this article. The participants' names have been anonymized. The action plans report that Simon has been in prison several times during his adult life, serving sentences for theft and handling of stolen goods. Simon was diagnosed with ADHD as a teenager and has received medical treatment since the age of 14. However, he said that he did not take his medication regularly while in prison, because he did not need it given the “fixed rules and regularity” of prison life. While serving his sentence, he has worked with technical installations to the superiors' great satisfaction. After finishing primary and lower secondary school Simon began vocational training, first as an electrician and later as a car mechanic, but completed neither. In between his prison sentences, Simon was unemployed most of the time and received unemployment benefit. At times he had been without any income at all. However, his parents had supported him financially. He had considerable debts, both to private individuals and to the state. His parents had helped and supported him in between his prison sentences in various ways. Besides paying the bills and offering housing, they had been in contact with several professionals in the social and health care system.

In addition to Simon's parents, six professionals attended the conference: a prison officer, a prison-based social worker, a social worker from social services, a coordinating social worker and a trainee—both from the Jobcentre—and a counsellor from the youth guidance centre (the latter four of these were affiliated to various areas of the local authorities). Simon's prison-based social worker chaired the conference and invited the other participants. Due to Simon's background as a social welfare client and inmate, the professionals knew him either on the basis of previous personal contact or from case files, and accordingly they were familiar with the previous interventions put in place by the social welfare and youth counselling system. The conference took place in the prison, where Simon had spent almost two years at the time. Simon was expecting to be released within two to three months, but at the time he was waiting for another trial to be completed. Therefore, the final date of release was not yet set, although he was convinced that he would be acquitted from all charges.

Extract 1—When professionals' intentions of user engagement enter practice

Just before the start of Extract 1, the participants introduce themselves. Simon, being the first, says, with irony: “My name is Simon and I am the project.” Simon's choice of words to describe himself reveals that he anticipated that the professionals in this specific institutional context expect him to be willing to put himself forward as the “case” to be discussed. Thus, rather than introducing himself as someone with specific wishes to put forward, he appears to be waiting for professional judgment and advice, thus casting himself as a client. As will be clarified further in the analysis, his use of irony throughout the conference may be a subtle form of resistance toward the conference setup, possibly as a reflection of low expectations to the benefits for him. In Extract 1, at the very beginning of the conference, SWP makes an appeal for a kind of joint mission among the professionals to support Simon in formulating his wishes in own words. In this way, SWP seeks to direct the other professionals' attention toward Simon as a user:

SWP: We haven't set a timeframe [for the meeting], because I didn't know how much each person has to contribute. We have many different things that we have talked about anyway that we would like to discuss at this conference. But now that there are so many of us, all with different approaches to Simon, I will start by saying that the focus is on Simon. Around this table there are definitely a lot of people with lots of ambitions for Simon and a lot of ideas of what's right, but we are not supposed to talk about that today. Today we'll talk about what it is Simon would like and how we can help him to do what he would like. This is what we need to try to focus on. I don't know if you would like to start Simon, by telling us what you see as the most important thing that needs to be sorted out?

Simon: It is both my housing situation and then some support when I get out. To get some control of my everyday life again.

SWP: Yes, and then we've talked about getting Simon's finances sorted.

Mother: Simon is in Ribers ² and he has a very, very large debt.

SWP: Yes, and also the financial support form, I think, so that you receive some money when you get out. It is you people from the municipality who should give us an idea of what the possibilities are for helping Simon financially, and with something to do, a place to live and some support to make it all work.

As formulated by SWP, Simon is encouraged to express his wishes, but the professionals do not explicitly pay attention to his needs or problems. This is done by SWP, when she encourages Simon to state what he would like to do, offering him the identity of a self-reliant individual with visions, plans, and ideas for his future. Simon is seen as a “user” who is expected to be able to select the areas of his life that most urgently require professional intervention. It is hence assumed, firstly, that Simon is capable of interpreting his own needs, of formulating them as wishes in accordance with the existing services options and, secondly, that he has a sufficient level of knowledge of those services to make reflected choices. However, Simon does not propose any concrete interventions, nor does he explain his needs more specifically during the conference than shown above.

In his response to SWP's introduction, Simon positions himself more as a client; he states his needs using words that possibly reflect what he believes to be the institutional expectations. Furthermore, he positions himself as a “victim” by indirectly referring to ADHD when talking of “control” of his life—in the literature lack of self-control is presented as one of the most central characteristics of ADHD (Barkley, 2010). However, Simon's words may also be related to the contemporary prison rehabilitation programs that focus on strengthening the individuals' cognitive and social skills and self-control.

Following Simon's response, SWP appears to abandon her initial idea of focusing on what Simon would like and allowing him to bring up the issues that he finds relevant by mentioning Simon's difficult economic situation. SWP now positions herself as Simon's “advocate” as well as a patronizing professional authority—a position from which she attempted to distance herself in her introduction. Subsequently, this is followed up and supported by Simon's mother who draws attention to Simon's “considerable debt,” thereby offering a passive and dependent identity to her son.

It is characteristic of the negotiation during the conference that the passive and dependent identity of Simon as a “client with needs” is constructed in parallel to and in conflict with the identity of “user with wants and future goals.” As will be further discussed below, Simon's parents continuously view ADHD as being at the root of Simon's problems and challenges, placing him in the position of “victim,” and based on this questioning whether Simon is responsible for his own situation. In that way, progress, understood as Simon acquiring the identity of someone who is self-reliant and responsible for his own actions, is resisted by the parents and at times by Simon himself. The professionals shift between positioning Simon as “user” and “client,” and while the positioning as user is done fairly subtly and mainly only in the beginning of the conference, the positioning as client is far more present. This makes the interactional course an ambivalent and risky space for Simon. If he accepts the user identity, he will be receiving less support in the prison release process than he would as a client. His concern seems to be related to his negative experiences from previous release processes, as indirectly expressed in his first reply in Extract 2.

Extract 2—Is Simon capable of living independently?

Extract 2 illustrates how the professionals and the parents discuss Simon's ability to take care of himself. It shows the different participants' description of Simon's behavior and how Simon's identity, and implicitly his responsibility, are negotiated between his mother and the professionals. The parents and the professionals seem to be arguing over who “owns” the case of Simon, and they resist each other's stances throughout the conference.

In the following extract, the SWJC refers to the SWP's introduction, emphasizing the importance of listening to Simon's views. The SWJC's framing of Simon's case is also related to the current Danish employment policy, according to which the emphasis is to be on clients' resources rather than on their problems, and it is the social worker who, together with the client, is to explore the client's resources (Høgsbro et al., 2013). Such a resource-oriented framework allows the professionals to appeal to “responsibility” as one solution to Simon's needs and concerns, even though Simon himself is worried about his future outside the prison:

Simon: That's also what I'm afraid of, that things will go wrong again. I don't need any more failures.

Mother: I don't think he is ever going to manage a normal life and hold down a normal job. I have also talked to Britta [SWSS] about early retirement pension, but she says that we are nowhere near that far yet.

SWJC: Well, things like that are assessed by the Jobcentre, but I basically agree with Britta [SWSS]. In light of the process you've been through, Simon, I don't think it's been optimal. I think we need to figure out how you can get yourself sorted out. Ideally, if all these things were okay, how would you be doing? I can also hear that you have a lot of skills, and if you could get the support, if we could find an employer willing to give you an internship, a small place, and perhaps I need you to tell me more about what you need. Firstly, you need help to get up in the morning, and secondly it needs to be a small place, where you don't have go to several different places, and it might also need to be a place where you only have to relate to one person, who gives you your assignments. Concrete things like these so we can find an employer where you might be able to get an internship.

Mother: So it will be supported employment he'll get then.

SWJC: What do you mean?

Mother: In the long term, it will be supported employment or flexi job or something else, I don't think…

SWJC: Not necessarily.

Mother: He will never be able to manage under completely normal conditions, I don't believe in that.

SWJC: Time will show.

Simon: I might also grow out of some of it at some point, I might become more sensible, the older I get.

Mother: Do you think so? I think you are getting wilder and wilder.

SWP: Some employers might also be more able to provide those conditions.

Within the positive resource framework, SWJC tries to position Simon as a “user,” who is self-reliant and has his own wishes, and SWP adds that he would benefit from some support to live his life. SWJC summarizes Simon's previous wishes regarding support, and she approaches Simon positively by focusing on his strengths and abilities, in an attempt to strengthen Simon's voice and attain a positive and nonstigmatized identity for Simon. SWJC resists Simon's mother's idea of early retirement, though does not exclude the possibility completely, saying that this is probably not going to happen, and maintains the resource perspective. Simon's mother overtly shows resistance to SWJC's first account of Simon, saying that she can only imagine him in supported employment, not in an ordinary job. Simon's mother's response presents Simon as a client who requires extensive social support. SWJC questions and seeks to delegitimize Simon's mother's stance, by replying “What do you mean?” Such disagreements between the professionals and Simon's mother occur several times during the conference. When Simon responds by positioning of himself as a potentially self-reliant person, answering that he might become more sensible over time, he accepts the professionals' proposed positioning of him with a positive identity, thereby showing resistance against the stigmatizing victim and client categories maintained by his mother.

As will be shown below, Simon is frequently talked about as a client who is dependent on help. The disagreements between the professionals and the parents seem to become the central issue during the conference, while the effort to have Simon participate becomes weaker in the course of the conference. Put differently, there is an increasing focus during the conference on defining the parents' and the professionals' positions in relation to each other, rather than a more task-oriented focus where Simon is encouraged to set the agenda and suggest important things to be discussed, as his words count the most.

Extract 3—Negotiation of Simon's responsibility

In Extract 3, Simon's responsibility for changing his behavior is discussed. The issue is why Simon periodically stays away from appointments with social services and what can be done when this happens. Hence, the question is whether Simon can rationally control his behavior or whether he is steered largely by impulsivity and irrationality. The professionals refer to their institutional task and require Simon to meet the requirements of the services, whereas the parents see Simon's problems as a consequence of ADHD and a lack of motivation and will power:

Mother: Simon stays away a lot. He does that sometimes.

Father: He has a complete meltdown when he receives a letter like that [a letter informing of financial sanctions due to ignoring agreements], that's it, then he goes on a massive drinking binge, or does something else stupid.

SWJC: This is where I think that a part of the plan or agreement which must also be made for Simon is that if you have some very clear agreements as to what happens, what do you do, what your advisor does if you stay away, what then. Then we call you, and if you don't answer the phone so we know [what's happened] that then you should call, and if you don't you might get a nasty letter. But then you shouldn't go drinking. Then we agree that you call instead, and then we'll take it from there. This kind of thing needs to go both ways, you also have to take responsibility.

Father: His behaviour might have matured a little, so that he doesn't do that, but in my experience it works the way I've just said.

Mother: The worst year we've had was the year between his two stays in prison. That was the worst year. It was horrible. It was a great relief for everyone when he came here [in prison].

Simon: Yes, it was a bit crazy.

Mother: No, it was not good, we couldn't take anymore.

Father: But it's nice that everybody around you is getting a lot of things going, but this really requires you to pull yourself together, you realize that.

Mother: But you can't always help it when you've got ADHD.

Father: All the stupid things you've been doing, you have to stop that!

…

SWJC: Anyway, I think it's difficult to tell you much about the services we have when we don't know much about what you think and what you yourself think you need support for.

The professionals do not support Simon's mother's argument that ADHD should diminish Simon's responsibility for his own actions in any way. SWJC offers a solution to Simon's apparent failure to keep his appointments, namely to make an agreement with Simon with the understanding that breach of the agreement will lead to sanctions. In doing this, she diverges from her initial strengths-based approach, accounting for the legitimacy of the proposed solution by referring to legislation. In this turn, Simon is positioned as a dependent client.

Although SWJC elaborates on SWP's introduction in Extract 1, and makes an appeal for a shared responsibility between the professionals and Simon, SWJC's rhetoric also differs slightly from SWP's. SWJC emphasizes the importance of agreeing on a plan for Simon, so that he can become a good client who willingly does as he is required to by the professionals. SWJC, as an employee at the Jobcentre, refers to the rules of the current labor market policy, which requires her to send letters to the client stating that the Jobcentre will suspend his financial support until he makes and attends a new appointment. In the end, SWJC moves away from her rather disciplinary attitude and attempts to regain the user perspective.

Three identity categories

We have examined professional practice and how it functions as producing sites of identities by looking at “identity as action” in a social work setting (Juhila and Abrams, 2011: 280). Our analysis has demonstrated different aspects of social work practice as different identity categories constantly overlap in a rather complex course of interaction. Through the participants' use of “different and competing versions” (Hall et al., 2006) in the discussion of the inmate Simon and his situation, we identified three distinct identity categories: “the client in need of support,” “the empowered and self-reliant user,” and the stigmatized “victim” due to Simon's neuropsychiatric diagnosis of ADHD and his criminal past. These alternative versions of Simon had profound implications for the course of interaction and for Simon's involvement in the conference. Little room was left for Simon to define his own situation and express his needs and wishes. As a consequence, Simon's participation remained vague throughout the conference.

The analysis identified an interactional inclination to shift continuously between positioning Simon as a client, i.e. as someone in need of professional help, and as a user assumed to be capable of making rational choices in accordance with the challenges of his present situation. The professionals occasionally tried to take Simon's perspective into account, “declientificate” him as a user (Messmer and Hitzler, 2011) and approached him as a self-reliant citizen ready to meet institutional expectations. However, the conference resulted in a controversy between the professionals and the parents over ownership of “the case,” as well as repeated efforts to position Simon by the use of different identity categories. A disagreement that diverted from the initial objective of the conference was to base Simon's release process on his own wishes. As a consequence, the priority given to Simon's own perspective during the conference was increasingly “forgotten.” This is, at least to some extent, similar to the mechanism described by Hitzler, who has illustrated how contradictory demands on professionals at a care planning conference lead to an “interactional dyad” between client and the professionals. This in turn leads to a “systematic reduction of the impact of the client role and to the avoidance of conflict” (2011: 306). Our study illustrates that at policy level, there exists the legal framework for user engagement, but in practice there seems to be lack of a shared understanding what that is.

The analysis also demonstrates some of the challenges when involving family members as part of the process in assessing what type of support can be offered to the client from social services. It became increasingly difficult to view Simon's position as a service user, with both Simon and his parents appealing for support. The parents described Simon using his ADHD diagnosis, portraying him as a victim of his situation (i.e. inmate) and of his ADHD. As such he was labeled as a “dependent,” rather than an empowered client. The professionals, however, did not accept the parents' medical explanation as a valid argument for Simon not having to be held responsible for his behavior.

Resistance in the interaction

Simon's participation in the conversation decreased as the conference progressed, illustrating a passive form of resistance, referred to as a “minimal response” by Juhila et al. (2013: 120). The contradictory identity positions offered to him and the unclear expectations connected to these positions, we argue, cause him to resist the social situation. At the same time, Simon made sporadic efforts to present himself as “normal” or “ordinary,” thereby showing that he recognized himself as being stigmatized due to his criminal past and diagnosis of ADHD. Simon expressed on several occasions that he did not want to risk being left without support following his release and was aware that this was a critical period. Toward the end of the conference, Simon began to accept his label as “client” in order to get the support needed. Consequently, the user identity was compromised and therefore his sense of responsibility.

The discourse of user engagement acknowledges clients as self-reliant and knowledgeable individuals in order to enhance their own responsibility for their rehabilitation process. If we consider user engagement as empowerment and thus as a matter of “discovering agency,” interventions may be more constructive when they encourage working with the client, so that he or she finds the process meaningful. On several occasions, Simon is talked about in the third person, which may have increased his resistance toward the professionals and his parents (Juhila et al., 2013). However, when it comes to marginalized and involuntary individuals, using strengths-based approaches risk threatening the client's social face, when clients “have little to report” (Solberg, 2011: 394) and if the situation is uncertain as may be the case for Simon.

Concluding remarks

We have examined the management and negotiation of responsibility in talking about an inmate's social situation, future and personal competencies. The analysis provides an example of the fragility and the complexity of user engagement in social work practice.

Case conferences may be seen as productive for engaging clients as they enable sharing of different perspectives on a client's social situation. Case conferences can, at least ideally, function as an arena in which the “best” possible knowledge about the client's situation is present and where the participants share and negotiate the responsibilities for working toward common goals. In this particular case, we question the extent to which this happened, although user engagement and self-responsibility are explicitly put forward as the aims of the conference by the professionals.

The professional's intention of creating an empowered and responsible client was restricted due to their frequent use of identity categories with passive connotations (“client” and “victim”), which was partly supported by the parent's use of the diagnostic discourse. The use of the two categories, “client” and “victim,” diminishes both blame and responsibility from the inmate, without actually placing or sharing responsibility among the other participants. This underpins a substantial difference between what the professionals say they do (accentuating Simon as “service user”), to what actually happens during the interaction. The analysis tentatively suggests that the conference positions the inmate as a dependent client and not so much as an empowered client.