How Offenders Transform Their Lives

Bonita Veysey, Johnna Christian, Damian J. Martinez, Bonita Veysey, Johnna Christian, Damian J. Martinez

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134028429
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Criminología

At a time when the scale of imprisonment in the United States has reached a historic high, researchers estimate that more than 600, 000 individuals a year are released from prison to return to their home communities. These individuals have serious needs, such as finding employment and housing, reuniting with family members, and obtaining healthcare and treatment for alcohol and substance abuse problems. While research in this area has stressed these aspects of the transition from prison, a less explored area of research considers the role of internal identity shifts from that of an offender to one of citizen, and how this creates the conditions for desistance from criminal behavior both within the confines of a correctional facility and in the reentry process.

This book presents a series of studies (mostly qualitative) that investigate individual identity transformation from offender status to pro-social, non-offending roles. Moreover, the work in this volume highlights the perspectives of the men and women who are current or formerly incarcerated people. Each piece provides an empirical analysis of the interaction between current or former prisoners and innovative pro-social programs and networks, which are grounded in the most current theoretical work about individual transformation and change.

This book will be of interest to undergraduates, postgraduates, researchers and lecturers in all fields within the social sciences, but especially criminology and criminal justice and sociology and social work/welfare.

Chapter 1

Identity transformation and
offender change¹

Bonita M. Veysey, Damian J. Martinez and Johnna Christian

The United States has now achieved a milestone unprecedented in its history. The recently released Pew Center on the States (2008) report estimates that 1 in 99 Americans are incarcerated in our nation’s jails and prisons today. This represents over 2.3 million adults. If one considers not only those incarcerated on a given day, but also those who are admitted to prisons and jails over the course of a year, the numbers are staggering. Over 12 million Americans are booked into jails alone in any given year (Veysey, forthcoming). While 1 per cent of the population is horrific, these odds still represent a good bet to the average citizen. The non-incarcerated population may still rest assured that arrest and prison time will not intrude upon their lives. However, if one considers any time spent incarcerated, nearly 3 per cent of today’s adults (1 in 37) have been incarcerated (Bonczar 2003). This 2001 statistic is expected to grow progressively worse over time. In fact, if incarceration rates remain the same, 6.6 per cent of people born in 2001 will be imprisoned at some time in their lives (Bonczar 2003).

Much of our sense of security comes from the recognition that persons arrested and sentenced to jails and prisons are not randomly selected from US society. They are disproportionately poor people, and they are largely people of color. These facts allow mainstream America to consciously and unconsciously assign them to the ‘them’ category, reassuring the ‘us’ category that we are morally superior. If there is, in fact, a ‘them’, then they are by necessity different from the ‘us’. It should come as no surprise, then, that our investigations on offenders focus on their problems. We know that many offenders, particularly the incarcerated population, have serious health, addiction and mental health conditions. They also have poor educational and employment skills, marginal housing and often come from violent neighborhoods and dysfunctional families. They are, then, distinguishably different from the common notions of an average citizen.

This year, over 600,000 people will be released from prison (Visher and Travis 2003), and many millions will be returning to their communities from shorter stints in jails. Reentry is the current buzzword used to organize and control the panic that states and communities are now voicing. Reentry is concerned with providing released prisoners with the services and supports (and often correctional supervision) that are presumed necessary for their successful reintegration into their home communities. But reentry is not new. Reentry is after all the reason parole was created many years ago. Like the early conversation about parole, the discourse centers largely on the lamentable and often deplorable conditions in which offenders find themselves. It is a short step from the problem to the solution. Logically, if offenders have a particular set of identifiable disorders and challenges, remedying those problems should reduce criminality. However, this assumes that these problems are directly and causally related to the offender’s criminal behavior – in the past and in the future. While research has demonstrated that certain pre-existing problems, such as drug addiction, are associated with criminal behavior, it is not clear that curing the addiction will result in a crime-free lifestyle. The way into criminality isn’t necessarily the way out in reverse.

Correctional programming in many ways is no different from medical, psychiatric or substance abuse treatment. These formal interventions by nature are symptom-focused, and therefore, deficit-based. Ameliorate the symptom and the disease process is contained and managed, if not eliminated. Interestingly, many fields are beginning to understand the limitations of this narrow perspective, and have begun to focus more attention on the role of social contexts in which illness processes are embedded. Twenty years ago, Arthur Kleinman, MD (1988) stated that medicine plays two roles: control of disease processes and the management of the illness experience. More recently, Jack Coulehan, MD (2005) similarly stated that medicine plays both an instrumental and a symbolic role. Medicine provides direct medical interventions to produce positive health outcomes. More importantly, the diagnosis of illness and the ontological meaning of that illness are constructed in the physician/patient interaction. Coulehan goes on to say that how illness is embedded in the life narrative has important implications for recovery. Persons who believe they will recover or who have narratives that find positive meaning in the illness experience are more likely to survive life-threatening illnesses than those who don’t. While it is unclear what physiological mechanisms are at work to produce this puzzling result, this same phenomenon is repeatedly observed in other disciplines, whether it is called a placebo effect, a Hawthorne effect, or is ascribed to unmeasured personal characteristics.

To this point, one of the more interesting facts cited by the European correctional evidence-based practices proponents comes from the psychotherapy literature (McNeill et al. 2005). A meta-analysis of this literature found that 40 per cent of ‘success’ was attributable to personal factors, 30 per cent to the therapeutic relationship, 15 per cent to expectancy or a placebo effect, and 15 per cent to the specific modality. Forty per cent, the person-specific attributes, are typically considered random factors. While studies included in the meta-analysis varied on the person-specific constructs measured (e.g. locus of control, self-efficacy), there is no consistent set of variables. The ‘random’ factors may, in fact, be systematic elements that remain unmeasured largely due to a lack of consensus regarding the importance of these variables in personal change. However, the importance of what people bring to the change endeavor cannot be underestimated.

In addition to the intangible personal resources that people bring with them the second most important factor is the human connection reflected in the therapeutic relationship. Fifteen per cent can be attributed solely to the belief that change can happen; that is, the placebo effect or expectancy factor. This leaves the remaining 15 per cent to the intervention itself. Yet in designing and implementing correctional and reentry programs, we disregard individuals’ strengths, resources and desires (the 40 per cent), don’t hire people who have excellent relational skills (the 30 per cent), don’t believe that hope matters (the 15 per cent), and rely on the remaining 15 per cent to solve the problem. We throw away 85 per cent of the resources that could be mobilized to support formerly incarcerated persons in their efforts to become productive citizens.

Roles and identity transformation

Much of what every person does in his or her day-to-day activities is prescribed by self-perceptions of roles and the normative behaviors associated with those roles. These self-concepts and their attendant behaviors are reinforced continuously by those in the person’s social networks. This is as true of a ‘prisoner’ role as it is for the role of ‘mother’. Transformations of core identities require substantial shifts in self-understanding as well as significant effort in renegotiating interpersonal interactions. Theories developed in the 1960s and 1970s have great relevance to this topic of identity transformation: Goffman’s (1963) conceptualization of stigma in particular. Symbolic interactionists and labeling theorists were interested in describing the manner in which people assume or are assigned deviant labels. While these theorists explain the pathway into negative identities, they did not explain the pathway out. In fact, Goffman (1963) suggests that once tainted, one could never regain normalcy unless the stigma could be hidden. Even so, the person was always at risk of discovery through the accidental use of interpersonal cues or being linked to someone from his or her past. Ebaugh (1988) generalized the aspects of these theories to describe all role transitions, positive and negative, and proposed a conceptual framework for role exit. While focusing on transitions in general, she acknowledges that the framework may be applied to transitions from negative to positive roles, such as addict to ex-addict, and for both voluntary and coerced exits, such as changing jobs or being arrested for the first time. The critical idea from her work is that role exit involves a period of dissatisfaction with the current role, weighing of alternative roles, a preliminary testing of a new role and the transition into the new role.

When applying these concepts to offenders, three predictable challenges to the change process emerge. First, when people make dramatic shifts in their primary identities, they may or may not be supported by their existing family and friendship networks. In order to sustain a new identity, a new network must be established. Second, available alternative roles may be limited. The number and nature of alternative roles are largely dependent on roles known to the individual, and, therefore, the breadth of possible roles may be limited due to a lack of exposure. Roles also may be limited by society’s level of tolerance. We want people to stop being criminals, but we do not necessarily want them to teach in our schools or be our neighbors or bosses. Third, possessing a stigma of criminal (or addict or mentally ill person, for that matter) is a visible blemish on the fabric of the moral character. It is a small leap to form the link between immorality and lack of trustworthiness. Trustworthiness, however, is the collateral used to get a job, buy a house or babysit for a neighbor’s child. Stigma discredits the individual and reduces trust. Thus, any trust extended will be minor, and the person’s behavior in a new role will be highly scrutinized.

Formal justice interventions and personal change

Much of the discussion on offender change focuses on programs operated by community corrections agencies. Implicit in this is the ability to provide surveillance together with linkages to needed services. In many respects, community corrections is exactly the wrong place using the wrong people to achieve the wrong goals. Community corrections agencies (and custodial facilities as well) across the country operate under a risk and needs model. Using validated risk instruments, criminogenic needs are targeted to reduce recidivism and improve community safety. Here’s the catch. Many of the criminogenic needs are related to personality structure. Humans are constantly in a state of flux, incorporating new experiences and knowledge into a largely stable set of personality traits and their attendant behaviors. All humans experience change. Every significant change is accompanied by a period of adjustment and stress. Behaviors may change, but the essence of the person persists. However, we believe that offenders must change core characteristics in order to remain crime-free. Somehow offenders are seen as essentially different and are expected to make dramatic changes not required of others who make life transitions. Maruna (2001), in Making Good, makes an interesting observation. Common personality characteristics that offenders exhibit, like anti-authoritarianism and risk-taking, that are directly related to criminal behavior are the very same characteristics that distinguish innovators. The challenge, therefore, is not to change personality traits (which are difficult to change in any event), but to maximize and redirect these traits to support positive roles.

Corrections professionals find themselves in the unenviable position of being both enforcer and helper. Some corrections staff persons are very good at engaging offenders in their own change process; others are abysmally poor. No standard exists for interpersonal skills, nor is there a priority placed upon hiring those with these skills. More importantly, the knowledge of how offenders remain crime-free resides within the offender community, not in the expert community. When asked, offenders can describe exactly how they changed and what they needed to sustain their change. Commonalities exist and generally reflect basic human needs: hope, people who believed in them, meaningful things to do. Rarely do the successful state that symptom control was key. Sometimes they say that treatment or programming had a positive effect, but often this had more to do with the relationship with the therapist or a specific corrections staff person than problem reduction.

The greatest criticism of corrections-based programs is that they operate under flawed assumptions, including: (1) offenders are essentially different from all other human groups; (2) reducing problems will reduce criminal behavior; (3) if services are made available, offenders will use them; and (4) services actually accomplish what they are designed to do. Even if we were able to create the perfect set of comprehensive and integrated services targeted to what former prisoners want and need, ‘fixing’ offenders’ problems only brings them halfway back. Corrections and reentry programs may accomplish the role exit component, but do not address the role entry component. Telling someone to stop being criminal may work for a period of time, but that person needs a replacement identity, and this identity may be chosen only by the individual who is in the process of change. Only offenders can accomplish the changes necessary to become productive members of society. No matter how coercive or punitive, corrections can’t do it, nor can treatment. The most these organizations can do is create the environments and conditions in which change is most likely to occur.

The importance of self-perception and life stories in the change process

This book presents a series of studies (mostly qualitative) that investigate individual identity transformation beyond offenders’ criminal selves and how former or current prisoners change their lives from offender to pro-social, non-offending roles. The studies cover a broad range of topics including education, support network interactions and reciprocity, and moments of change. Through these studies, we provide evidence that engaging former and current prisoners in their own change process is more meaningful for rehabilitative and reentry measures than is using external, formal programmatic measures to ‘fix’ them. To a large extent the book captures the difference between the risk, needs, responsivity and the good lives models described by Ward and Maruna (2007). The former approach relies on formal interventions and expertise and emphasizes a reduction of offending behavior as the primary measure of success. The latter is concerned with building meaningful lives and changing the factors that are most problematic from the offender’s perspective. Moreover, many of the contributors draw from a strengths-based perspective which ‘begins with the assumption that ex-convicts are stigmatized persons, and implicitly that this stigma (and not some internal dangerousness or deficit) is at the core of what makes ex-convicts likely to reoffend’ (Maruna and LeBel 2003: 97). Working from this assumption, the contributors to the book illuminate the various ways that former offenders exercise agency in resisting such stigma and creating a sense of self that promotes and sustains change.

Much of the previous work in this area draws from studies based in the United Kingdom. In response, this book emphasizes research in the United States and selectively includes studies from the United Kingdom that complement the focus. It is vital that questions of transformation and internal change be applied in the United States because the scale of incarceration is unmatched anywhere else in the world (Pew Center on the States 2008), and the history of the marginalization of racial and ethnic minorities creates structural barriers to transformation that interact with the internal mechanisms of change. Moreover, the work in this volume highlights the perspective of the men and women who are currently or formerly incarcerated. Each piece provides an empirical analysis of the interaction between current or former prisoners and innovative pro-social programs and networks, which are grounded in the most current theoretical work about individual transformation and change.

This introductory chapter introduces the reader to the primary concepts of social roles, the effects of stigma on the ability of individuals to negotiate positive roles and identities, and the challenges faced by offenders as they adjust to community life after incarceration. To give the reader a sense of the material covered and the interrelatedness of each chapter, we outline the general substance and focus of each of them. The following chapters are organized into three broad areas of concentration: the nature of identity transformation (Chapters 1 to 3), the role of programs, families and social support on the transforming self (Chapters 4 to 8), and how reformed peers use their ex-identity in service to others (Chapters 9 and 10). The book concludes with a chapter on the policy implications of these studies and ideas.

Many fields are beginning to ask similar questions about the nature of change: from illness to wellness, from addiction to recovery; from criminal to citizen. Essential to all of these discussions is the concept of identity transformation. What all of these perspectives share is: (1) the limitations of formal systems to change individuals, (2) the importance of personal identity embedded in a cultural or personal narrative, (3) a reduced emphasis on deficits, (4) the role of the social context in defining the problem and the solution, and (5) the importance of role identity in illness and wellness. What is not known are the mechanisms of identity transformation and the necessary and sufficient conditions under which transformation is possible. In Chapter 2, Christian, Veysey, Herrschaft and Tubman-Carbone explore these issues based on a study identifying shared themes and elements of transformation narratives of formerly incarcerated people and persons in other stigmatized groups.

The study of desistance from crime has come of age in recent years, and there...