After Crime and Punishment

Shadd Maruna, Russ Immarigeon

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135986704
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

The issue of resettling ex-prisoners and ex-offenders into the community has become an increasingly important one on both sides of the Atlantic. In the USA the former Attorney General Janet Reno identified the issue as 'one of the most pressing problems we face as a nation' in view of the massive prison population and the rapid increase in rates of incarceration, while in the UK it has become an increasingly important issue for similar reasons, and the subject of recent reports by HM Inspectorate of Prisons and HM Inspectorate of Probation, as well as from the Social Exclusion Unit of the Home Office.

Yet this issue has not been well served by the criminological literature, and the new policies and programmes that have been set up to address the problem have not been well grounded in criminological thinking. This book seeks to address the important set of issues involved by bringing together the best of recent thinking and research into desistance from crime, drawing upon research in both the UK and the USA, and with a distinct focus on how this might impact upon the design and implementation of ex-offender reintegration policy.

Part 1

Desistance Theory and Reintegration Practice

Chapter 1

Ex-offender reintegration: theory and practice

Shadd Maruna, Russ Immarigeon and Thomas P. LeBel

Jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins was 21 years old when his addiction to heroin threatened to end his budding musical career, just at a point when he was breaking in with the top jazz players of the day, including Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk. In 1951, many of these now famous composers and musicians were less well known and they would sit around small clubs, like Minton’s in Harlem, playing what they knew, what they felt and what came to them. They were fashioning their careers and their legacies, but some of them were addicted to heroin. Indeed, heroin and other drugs were rampant in the jazz community in those years, so addictive behaviours were not viewed with much derision and addicts were typically not excluded from the community of jazz musicians.

But Sonny Rollins, like a few others, was deeper into the consequences of addiction. He committed a few strong-armed robberies and, subsequently, he spent some time on Rikers Island, New York City’s jail. When on release, the threat of parole revocation shadowed his days and nights. He continued his drug use but he knew that one day he would be caught, returned to prison and left to an uncertain future.

Rollins found himself in great conflict. On the one hand, he was being welcomed into a talented circle but, on the other hand, he was seen as disreputable, especially by nightclub owners who booked musicians. According to jazz biographer Eric Nisenson (2000), Rollins recognized his conflict most ostensibly in the facial expressions of Charlie Parker, who was also a heroin user. One evening in 1951, Nisenson relates, Parker and Rollins were playing together at a recording session held only a few weeks after Rollins had been released on parole from Rikers.

Rollins tells the story like this:

At the time of this session, I was on parole but I knew that I was probably headed back to Rikers Island because I was still getting high. Charlie Parker asked me something like, ‘Well, are you okay now?’ or something of that nature – ‘Have you straightened yourself out?’ – because he was always a very avuncular figure to me. That’s when I told him, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m straight now.’ But there was somebody on the date with whom I had just been getting high before the date, and he spilled the beans to Bird [Charlie Parker] … After Bird found that out he became very cold to me. Not just cold to me, I could see in his face that once again he had been confronted with the fact that all of his young protégés were messed up on drugs. So once again this was in front of him. I could see that in him at that session and I got the realization of how he must really feel about it. I realized then that I really wanted to get off drugs. I thought, ‘Okay, this is the impetus to get off drugs and I’m going to come back one day and show Bird that I actually did get off drugs. And this time it will be true.’ I saw the pain in his face that day. And then it all made sense to me. (Nisenson 2000: 51–2)

Kicking heroin addiction, like breaking out of other entrenched behaviour patterns, is no easy thing. Despite his revelation during the session with Parker, it was another few years, and other close calls, before Rollins voluntarily entered a federal drug treatment programme in Lexington, Kentucky, where he began a successful recovery process. Rollins re-emerged in Chicago at the end of 1955 as a member of the Clifford Brown–Max Roach Quintet, and soon established himself as a master of thematic improvisation. In 1957, he won the prestigious Down Beat magazine Critics’ Poll as ‘New Star’ of the tenor saxophone, and the rest, as they say, is history (for those interested in this history, see Kirschner 2000).

Sonny Rollins’ escape from criminality and drug addiction is a story of desistance from crime. Of course, Rollins’ contributions to the world of jazz – jazz critic Gary Giddens (1992: 164) has called him ‘the world’s greatest living saxophonist’ – make him one of the most successful exconvicts in recent history. Yet the processes of interpersonal reintegration and recovery from addiction he underwent are increasingly familiar ones. Indeed, the topic of ex-offender reintegration has become among the most important issues in criminology and related disciplines.

Reintegration (or ‘re-entry’ as it is sometimes called) is both an event and a process. Narrowly speaking, re-entry comes the day a prisoner is released from confinement. In its own way, the time (or timing) of a prisoner’s release offers challenges and conflicts that may or may not be managed by corrections officials or criminal justice agents. For instance, shortly before he became better known, the cult leader Charles Manson was an average prisoner being released from San Quentin into the San Francisco Bay area. In one version of the events of this day (see Emmons 1986), Manson hitched a ride just outside the gates of the prison from a delivery truck driver who almost immediately offered him a marijuana cigarette. Manson, not unreasonably, was startled that drugs were so readily available so close to the prison and wondered what was happening to the society that had kept him in isolation for a significant amount of time. Other, less notorious ex-offenders tell similar stories of being delivered from a prison to an inner-city bus station in the middle of the night, with $40 in gate money, nowhere to go and no one except drug dealers waiting for them in the station. What impact do such episodes have for a person newly released from confinement? At present, answers are more readily available from biographical accounts of prisoner life than from social science research, although this is changing (see, e.g. Travis et al. 2001; Chapter 9 this volume).

More broadly, re-entry is also a long-term process, one that actually starts prior to release and continues well afterwards. It is fashionable among some British resettlement workers to suggest that the re-entry process should begin as soon as the individual is taken into custody. That is, everything that is done to a convicted person should be serving the cause of preparing the individual for success after release. By this larger definition (the one most of the contributors to this book will be concerned with), reintegration encompasses many aspects of processes that go by names such as ‘corrections,’ ‘rehabilitation,’ ‘treatment’ and the like. In fact, the UK Association of Chief Officers of Probation recently defined ‘resettlement’ as:

A systematic and evidenced-based process by which actions are taken to work with the offender in custody and on release, so that communities are better protected from harm and re-offending is significantly reduced. It encompasses the totality of work with prisoners, their families and significant others in partnership with statutory and voluntary organisations. (Cited in Morgan and Owers 2001: 12, emphasis added)

Essentially, then, reintegration involves everything – from literacy training to electronic monitoring – that is intended to reduce recidivism after release from prison. As such, public and governmental interest in successful re-entry is, of course, of longstanding vintage.

Still, the topic has never been more urgent than it is today. At the time of writing, in the USA, around 600,000 men and women (over 1,600 per day) will be released from prisons, compared to around 170,000 in 1980 (see especially Travis and Petersilia 2001). Criminological research suggests that many of them, perhaps even the majority of them in some states, will not achieve anything resembling successful reintegration into society. For instance, of the 459,000 US parolees who were discharged from community supervision in 2000, 42 per cent were returned to incarceration – 11 per cent with a new sentence and 31 per cent in some other way (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2001). In a recent study of 272,111 state prisoners released in 1994, 67.5 per cent were rearrested within three years, as compared to an estimated 62.5 per cent in a similar study of 1983 releases (Langan and Levin 2002).

In fact, re-entering society seems to be more difficult and precarious a transition than ever before. In 1980, 27,177 released ex-offenders were returned to state prisons in the USA. In 1999, this number was 197,606. As a percentage of all admissions to state prison, parole violators more than doubled from 17 per cent in 1980 to 35 per cent in 1999 (in California, a staggering 67 per cent of prison admissions were parole failures). Between 1990 and 1999 the number of parole violators rose by 50 per cent while the number of new court commitments rose by only 7 per cent (Hughes et al. 2001). This indicates that the re-entry problem is not only a product of the 1990s’ incarceration boom in the USA but was actually a leading cause of the boom as well.

Arguably, the situation for ex-offenders in the UK is less dire. Certainly, Britain has a longer and more substantive history of addressing the housing, employment and counselling needs of released prisoners (Haines 1990). Still, the UK prison population has jumped from around 40,000 in 1992 to over 68,000 today, and may reach as high as 90,000 in the near future (Grove et al. 1999). Moreover, substantial difficulties remain for returning ex-convicts (see Hagell et al. 1995; Metcalf et al. 2001; Niven and Olagundaye 2002). In fact, 57 per cent of all prisoners in England and Wales discharged in 1996 were reconvicted for a standard list offence within two years of their release (Home Office 2001). In a joint thematic review on resettlement issues, HM Inspectorates of Prisons and Probation conclude ‘The resettlement needs of many prisoners are being severely neglected’ because of the lack of an overall strategy for reintegration (Morgan and Owers 2001: 1).

It is no wonder that, in the USA, the re-entry issue has been described by former Attorney General Janet Reno as ‘one of the most pressing problems we face as a nation’ (2000). The importance of improving the prison release and re-entry process may be one of the few issues on which Reno agrees with the current Attorney General, John Ashcroft. In July 2002, Ashcroft announced that 68 different jurisdictions will share $100 million in grant funds through the new ‘Serious and violent offender reentry’ initiative, a reworking of the ‘Young offender reentry’ initiative originally proposed during Reno’s term in office. The purpose of the much-touted new initiative is ‘to ensure public safety and reduce victimization by helping returning offenders become productive members of their communities’ (OJP 2002).

Similarly, in the UK there have been numerous recent calls for the development of a ‘National rehabilitation strategy’ or system-wide resettlement agenda for HM Prison Service for England and Wales (Morgan and Owers 2001; Social Exclusion Unit 2001; Home Office 2002). Among the proposals being advocated include a ‘going straight contract’ to be signed by prisoners and prison staff, the creation of ‘rehabilitation governors’ in every prison; and the development of resettlement performance targets to which every prison will be held accountable. In the USA, some state and local prison systems are gradually integrating ‘release planning’ into their standard custodial functions.

The promise of desistance theory

Some projects under development in the UK and the USA are incredibly exciting new efforts that involve multiple agencies and detailed planning. Yet these new initiatives hardly represent a new paradigm in reintegration practice. Criminologist James Austin (2001) argues that even though ‘re-entry’ has become ‘the new buzzword in correctional reform’ the term is often ‘simply another word for parole supervision, which many have tried to discredit and dismantle’ (p. 314). Certainly, its not an unfamiliar habit for the corrections industry to dress up a failed old policy as a seemingly new, exciting paradigm shift simply by changing a few agency names (see Cohen 1985). As a buzzword, ‘reentry’ appears to connote something similar to previous terms such as ‘prisoner aftercare’ (Haines 1990), ‘throughcare’ (McAllister et al. 1992), ‘discharged prisoners’ aid’ (Soothill 1974), ‘reintegration’, ‘integration’, ‘parole’ and the currently preferred term in Britain, ‘resettlement’ (see Morgan and Owers 2001).

A legitimate paradigm shift would require, among other things, a new understanding of the process of reintegration – in a word, new theory – on top of the new buzzwords and taskforce names. Unfortunately, for the most part, current reintegration practices seem to be operating in a theoretical vacuum, with no clear explanation for how the process is supposed to work (see especially Simon’s 1993 history of parole). Maloney et al. (2001: 24) quip: ‘If there is an intervention theory in use, it is generally based on the rather bizarre assumption that surveillance and some guidance can steer the offender straight.’ Ed Rhine (1997: 74) concludes that the lack of a ‘plausible narrative of community-based supervision’ is ‘the most pressing and vexing problem facing probation and parole administrators today’.

Much of the blame for this predicament has to be laid at the feet of corrections officials and policy-makers who are too wedded to the status quo and too fearful of appearing ‘soft on crime’ to experiment with innovations that might improve life opportunities for ex-offenders. Practitioners also share some blame. Practitioners need to bring the everyday realities of offenders’ lives to the attention of policy-makers as well as academic researchers. Notably, they must identify key service delivery concerns that establish greater acceptance for the use of community-based interventions. In the course of several decades of a ‘nothing works’ mindset, practitioners have largely refrained from speaking – loudly at least – about ‘what works’ in this way.¹

Finally, academic criminologists most certainly cannot escape the blame for the apparent void in reintegration theory. As Frank Cullen (2002: 283) writes: ‘Although criminology is rich in contemporary theories of crime, true theories of correctional intervention are in short supply. One searches in vain in mainstream criminology journals and textbooks for new systematic theories of intervention and for empirical tests of these perspectives.’ Like others, Cullen blames this lack of theoretical innovation on the legacy of the ‘nothing works’ challenge to the practice of rehabilitation: ‘Developing theories of effective intervention seemed ill advised if there was, in essence, no “treatment effect” to be explained.’ (2002: 283). There are exceptions, of course. Cullen rightly cites the principles of rehabilitative practice developed by Canadian researchers Don Andrews and James Bonta (1998) and Paul Gendreau (1996). Likewise, Joan Petersilia’s (2003) recent book When Prisoners Come Home articulates a clea...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Foreword
• List of Contributors
• Part I Desistance Theory and Reintegration Practice
• Part II Methodological Considerations
• Part III Applied Research on Desistance
• Part IV Desistance-focused Reintegration Research
• Index