Emotional Literacy in Criminal Justice

Professional Practice with Offenders

C. Knight

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137273192, 9781137273208
• eBook ISBN: 9781137273215
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emotions in Psychology
• Index: Social Sciences

Emotions remain largely invisible in the management of criminal justice practice. This book seeks to uncover some of the underground emotional work of practitioners and make visible the impact of both positive and negative emotions, which play a crucial role in practitioner-offender relationships.
Exploring how practitioners understand, regulate and work with emotion, Knight argues that the 'soft skills' of emotion are more likely to achieve motivation and change in offenders than the 'hard' skills of punishment, monitoring and surveillance. The book examines some of the gendered implications of this practice and develops an argument for the explicit building of emotional resources within organizations to sustain the development, enhancement and support of emotional literacy in the workforce.
Using practice examples, Knight reveals how practitioners can benefit from having an understanding of their own emotions and howthese can impact on their practice. This unique and accessible book will be a valuable resource to practitioners across the criminal justice sector including probation officers, youth justice workers, police and prison officers, social workers, policymakers and managers, as well as scholars working within criminology, criminal justice and probation.

1

Introduction: The Challenge of Uncovering and Using Emotions in Criminal Justice

Introduction

We tend to see negative emotions and ‘punitiveness’ as understandable and appropriate responses to criminality. People who have transgressed the criminal law and caused harm to others are believed to be deserving of punishment for their offending regardless of whether this punishment makes any difference to their likelihood of reoffending in the future. Punishment conveys society’s disapproval and condemnation of such behaviour. Both media and political discourse about criminal behaviour use punitive rhetoric and arguments for increasing levels of external control on offenders. However, the task of criminal justice practitioners is to manage, control and help offenders with fairness and decency; a challenging expectation in this culture of punitiveness. This book outlines the case for developing the skills of emotional literacy and the use of positive emotions in the criminal justice workforce. In interventions with offenders, such a skill can help offenders begin to take responsibility for their behaviour, to develop internal controls and seek to change those aspects of their behaviour that are the most damaging to society and to themselves. In all situations it can enable criminal justice practitioners to understand and regulate their own emotions and to make better informed judgements and decisions about their practice.

As adults, most of us manage our lives through our ability to think and respond rationally and logically to the social world in which we live. We are also emotional creatures who make many of the most important decisions in our lives, for example, concerning our long-term relationships, our work and our living arrangements, on the basis of ‘feelings’. We are encouraged to understand the world in which we live through an accumulation of knowledge and the application of cognitive skills. However, we are also likely to deal better with our circumstances if we can think intelligently and reflectively about our feelings and their impact on, and interrelationship with, our cognitive skills (Howe 2008).

The criminal justice system is constituted to respond to, control and punish criminal behaviour in an objective, rational and just manner. As far as possible the system aims to exclude emotion on the basis that emotions are likely to interfere with and distort the process of justice (Karstedt et al. 2011). In a parallel process, criminology as the science and academic discipline that studies crime and criminal justice has been committed to the same ideals of reason and reasonable discourse in relation to modern penal law and the practice of criminal justice in its institutions (Karstedt et al. 2011). Karstedt argues that historically criminal justice and criminology have been suspicious of emotions and that criminology’s approach to emotions has been cautious and circumspect (Karstedt et al. 2011). However, criminal justice is an emotional arena, a place where powerful emotions are experienced by, and impact on, offenders, victims and practitioners (Karstedt et al. 2011). Practitioners working in this system will encounter people who are often in highly emotional states associated with, or as a result of, their offending behaviour, and further aroused by being processed through a system that is designed to punish and control them, for this behaviour. Workers in the system have to manage and respond to these emotions, and the emotions engendered in themselves, on a daily basis. The dichotomy between the presentation of criminal justice as an emotion-free zone and the reality for practitioners, offenders, victims and witnesses within the system forms an important context for this book.

The book concerns itself with the ‘feelings’ and emotional skills of practitioners working within the criminal justice system. It is argued that in working with a transformative process, the managing of change in an offender population, practitioners need to be ‘emotionally available’ to the people they work with. Punishment can be a blunt instrument in enforcing change, often engendering resentment, shame, fear and powerlessness in its recipients. Whilst punishing and restricting the liberty of people who have committed very serious crimes is seen as an essential feature of criminal justice, as a blanket policy it does little to reach those offenders, the majority, who are capable of change and development. Emotional literacy, by contrast, is a communicative tool through which practitioners engage, understand and motivate the offenders they work with. Whilst punishing people for their criminal behaviour may make us, as a society, feel ‘avenged’ it has a limited role in affecting real or positive change in the offenders themselves. The skilfulness and emotional availability of practitioners can enable an offender to begin to undertake the hard work of recognising, and accepting responsibility for, the harm they have caused, and effecting change in their lives in order to reduce the risk of reoffending. Practitioners whose role may be more about managing and processing offenders through the system (e.g. police and prison officers) will be equally challenged by the emotional content of their work, and will benefit from having a greater understanding and ‘literacy’ in the manner in which they deploy their feelings in their work.

In any criminal justice practice, an understanding of the values and beliefs that underpin the work and how they impact on practice should be of central concern (Rutherford 1993). The participants in the research for this book identified the active use of their emotional skills, their ability to engage emotionally and their ability to be ‘non-judgmental’ towards offenders as crucial to the process of building relationships and enabling positive change in their lives (Knight 2012). Using the experiences of these probation practitioners who worked with humanitarian values, the book aims to offer some insights into the application of emotional literacy for all criminal justice workers.

Practice context

Whilst the modernisation of criminal justice during the 20th century may have placed ‘reason’ and ‘rationality’ at its core, and largely excluded ‘emotion’, there is a paradox in operation. Karstedt argues that after many decades of apparent ‘objectivity’, ‘emotionality’ has returned to the criminal justice arena (Karstedt et al. 2011). There has been a ‘re-emotionalisation of law’ (De Haan and Loader 2002) with the return of ‘shame’ into criminal justice procedures, in particular through ideas of restorative justice (Braithwaite 1989) and with a stronger focus on victims and their emotional needs. The public are actively encouraged, through the media in particular, to express strong feelings in relation to crime and to expect that legislation will reflect these concerns (e.g. ‘Sarah’s Law’ on the child sex offender disclosure scheme (Lipscombe 2012)).

The introduction of victim personal statements in which victims of particular crimes¹ are enabled to present to the court the impact that the crime has had on them and their families has also encouraged the view that sentencing can be influenced by powerful feelings generated by the harm caused by crime (Gelsthorpe 2009). This emotionality, identified in terms of ‘the public demands this or that’ (Gelsthorpe 2009: 191) is used to justify increasingly harsh punishments and the greater use of imprisonment. Sometimes courts are influenced directly by the emotions of the event; for example, the sentencing of people caught up in the riots of 2011 was seen to be responding very ‘toughly’ to an unusual set of circumstances and was commended by politicians at the time. The average prison sentence imposed for people convicted during the riots was 25% longer than normal, indicative of a more punitive response (Bottoms 1995, Travis and Simon 2011). Karstedt identifies this as the emergence of a highly emotional discourse on crime and justice (Karstedt et al. 2011), what Bottoms refers to as ‘popular punitiveness’ (Bottoms 1995). Increasingly, crime policies appear to be based on the expression of the collective emotions of anger and fear about crime, and politicians are seen to compete with each other to ‘address the emotional needs of the public’ (Karstedt 2002). The depth and impact of powerful emotions generated by the often traumatic terrain of crime and offending behaviour on practitioners working in the system, coupled with the ‘emotionality’ of the media and political discourse on crime and sentencing, confronts the workers in the system with particular dilemmas and tensions.

The concept of ‘control’ is a significant feature of the work of criminal justice and emotions are often closely linked to issues of control. Criminal justice practitioners are expected to control and limit the worst excesses of criminal conduct. To aid an understanding of how this control is exercised within different criminal justice settings, reference is made to Layder’s theory of interpersonal emotional control (Layder 2004). Layder identifies a spectrum ranging from ‘benign’ control, exercised with a largely therapeutic and humanitarian aim, through to a more ‘malign’ or ‘manipulative’ form of emotional control, with a repressive aim all of which can be evidenced in criminal justice practice. The book presents an argument that the instrumental and administrative processes of criminal justice are the visible workings of the system, but of equal importance are these emotional processes, or ‘underground emotion work’ (Layder 2004) undertaken by practitioners which remains largely suppressed, invisible and unacknowledged.

Although there have been studies of the emotional impact of the work in terms of stress and burnout in relation to criminal justice practice (Tewksbury and Higgins 2006, Collins, Coffey et al. 2009, Griffin et al. 2009, Adams and Buck 2010, Schaible and Gecas 2010) there has been little written about how criminal justice practitioners actually manage and use their emotions in their work. Crawley has explored the emotional lives of prison officers (Crawley 2004, Crawley 2009). She identified that in the prison environment prison officers strive, with more or less success, to achieve a degree of emotional neutrality and detachment in their work. Van Stokkhom has reflected on the need for a better understanding of emotion management and emotional intelligence in policing, in the face of challenging and often negative emotional situations (Van Stokkom 2011). Other writers have examined soft power in prisons (Crewe 2011) and in relation to offenders (Puglia, Stough et al. 2005). There is literature that relates it to mental health (Akerjordet and Severinsson 2004), health care (Clarke 2006), and in a range of other settings (Salovey and Sluyter 1997, Bar-On and Parker 2000). The closest association for this book is the use of emotional intelligence in the field of social work, which is still in its infancy (Morrison 2007, Howe 2008), although there is a substantial body of literature on the importance of relationships within the social work context, for example, Thompson (2009) and Hennessey (2011).

Emotional intelligence

The more commonly used term in most writings on the subject is that of ‘emotional intelligence’. Research and literature on emotional intelligence has, to date, been largely centred on the world of business, management and leadership (e.g. Goleman 1995, Bachmann, Stein et al. 2000). Until relatively recently a fairly narrow view of intelligence was promulgated – that it consisted of a narrow range of cognitive capacities (Barrett and Gross 2001). The idea that there might be more than one form of intelligence was first proposed by Howard Gardner in 1983 who has published since then on the theory of ‘multiple intelligences’ (Gardener 1984, Gardener 1993). Gardner argued that intelligence is not limited to the traditional view of IQ (intelligence quotient), but is in fact a collection of between seven and nine different intelligences. These include linguistic, logical–mathematical, musical, spatial, bodily/kinaesthetic, interpersonal and intrapersonal (Gardener 1984). The last two on this list are the most closely associated with the concept of emotional intelligence.

The first use of the term ‘emotional intelligence’ in psychology was by Payne who believed that emotional intelligence was stifled by a tendency to suppress emotions, leading to a range of mental health difficulties (Payne 1985 cited in Howe 2008: 11). Salovey and Mayer went on to define and develop this concept (Salovey and Mayer 1990):

The capacity to reason about emotions, and of emotions to enhance thinking. It includes the abilities to accurately perceive emotions, to access and generate emotions to assist thought, to understand emotions and emotional knowledge, and to reflectively regulate emotions so as to promote emotional and intellectual growth. (Mayer and Salovey 1997: 197).

It spread fairly quickly to the media and popular science (Howe 2008). People with good emotional intelligence were seen to do well at school and at work, and in particular were good at social relationships. Goleman popularised the concept and extended it to business and leadership (Goleman 1995, Goleman 1996, Goleman 1998, Goleman et al. 2002). Goleman builds his ideas from a range of sources and identifies what he calls the ‘great divide’ in human abilities that lies between the mind and heart, or what he calls more technically between cognition and emotion (Cherniss and Goleman 2001). He argues that some abilities, such as IQ and technical expertise, are purely cognitive, and that other abilities integrate thought and feeling and fall within the domain of ‘emotional intelligence’. However, other writers challenge the view that any abilities might be purely cognitive, and argue that all good decision-making is in fact ‘embodied’ or made with a combination of feelings, thoughts and reflections (LeDoux 2003, Lakoff 1987).

It is suggested that emotional intelligence is not just about managing or suppressing emotions but refers to the capacity to think and reflect on feelings rather than act impulsively, what Chamberlayne describes as ‘experiential truth’ or ‘emotional thinking’ (Chamberlayne 2004), and which is also referred to as ‘emotion appraisal’ (Gendron 2010). Attempts have been made to measure emotional intelligence and two tests have been developed; Situational Test of Emotion Management (STEM) and the Situational Test of Emotional Understanding (STEU) (Austin 2010). However, current definitions of emotional intelligence are inconsistent about what it measures; some indicate that it is dynamic and can be learned or increased (an intelligence that is malleable); and others that it is stable and cannot be increased (Mayer and Salovey 1997). One of the most recent training manuals on emotional intelligence uses the Emotional Quotient Inventories (EQ-1 and EQ3-60), which were developed from Bar-On’s original EQ-1 model and recently updated. The significant difference in this most recent model is that it incorporates stress management as a component of emotional intelligence and includes flexibility, stress tolerance and optimism (Hughes and Bradford Terrell 2012).

However, as Fineman cautions, the movement to identify a measurement of emotional intelligence risks imposing a set of measurements and numbers on a quality that to some extent defies these parameters (Fineman 2004). Locke goes further and argues that emotional intelligence is an invalid concept both because it is not a form of intelligence and because it is defined so broadly and inclusively that it has no intelligible meaning (Locke 2005). He concludes that the only useful way to proceed is to focus on the skill of introspection, which he identifies as involving the identification of the contents and processes of one’s own mind. Through introspection Locke argues it is possible to monitor such things as ‘one’s degree of focus, one’s defensive reactions and one’s emotional responses and their causes’ (Locke 2005: 429), and that such monitoring has important implications for self-esteem and mental health.

Whilst some of the scepticism about emotional intelligence and its potential for measurement may be well founded, nevertheless, it will be argued that the concept of ‘emotional literacy’, as a skill, rather than emotional intelligence per se, offers a model for understanding how practitioners work with their own and other’s emotions.

Emotional literacy

Emotional literacy as a concept in criminal justice defines the skills that criminal justice practitioners may use in understanding their own emotions and working effectively and appropriately with the emotions of offenders, victims and witnesses (Knight 2012). At its least complex, possessing a degree of emotional ‘intelligence’ provides a communicative tool that can enable a workforce to respond to its customer base with courtesy and respect, and to handle, albeit maybe only superficially, conflict situations that can arise. It can enable all workers to recognise that they will, on occasions, have strong feelings (reactions) to the situations confronting them. They may not always understand the cause of these feelings, but they can find ways of controlling and managing these feelings such that they do not compound any punishment already legitimately imposed on offenders, or ‘corrupt’ or ‘interfere with’ the due process of their work. At its best and most complex, emotional ‘literacy’ is about the worker being emotionally available to the service user. It can enable a worker to dig below the surface of the many defences, anxieties, fears and rages that can obscure a full understanding of why people commit crime, its impact on their lives and what might enable them to make changes in their lives. It can help people to tell their ‘stories’, often very painful stories, arising from traumatic events, or early childhood abuse or neglect, and perhaps never previously articulated. It can enable the worker to have the empathy, strength and resilience to ‘hear’ these stories, to be able to contain their own emotional distress in response to these stories and to help the storyteller to begin to make sense of their realities. It is argued that both the superficial and the more complex uses of emotional literacy are beneficial in the volatile and emotionally charged arena of criminal justice, although it is the latter that is the central theme of this book.

The knowledge base for emotional literacy builds on the concept of emotional intelligence. It has been defined as being about self-awareness:

The capacity to register our emotional responses to the situations we are in and to acknowledge those responses to ourselves so that we recognize the ways in which they influence our thoughts and actions. (Orbach 2001: 2)

Orbach...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: The Challenge of Uncovering and Using Emotions in Criminal Justice
• 2 Emotions and Criminal Justice
• 3 Diversity, Power and Emotion
• 4 Values: Positive and Negative Emotional Control in Work with Offenders
• 5 Developing Emotional Literacy in Practitioners
• 6 Building Relationships with Offenders
• 7 Using Emotional Literacy to Manage Risk and Change in Offenders
• 8 Emotions in Organisations
• 9 Strategies for Sustaining Emotional Literacy in the Workplace
• 10 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index