Young Offenders

Crime, Prison and Struggles for Desistance

M. Halsey, S. Deegan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137411211
• eBook ISBN: 9781137411228
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Young Offenders provides one of the most in-depth studies of young males seeking, if often failing, to find a life beyond crime and punishment. Through rich interview data of young offenders over a ten year period, this book explores the complex personal and situational factors that promote and derail the desistance process.

1

Setting the Scene

In their influential work Shared Beginnings, Divergent Lives, Laub and Sampson (2006: 145) pose the question: ‘Why do some offenders stop offending?’ Their response was as follows:

It appears that offenders desist as a result of a combination of individual actions (choice) in conjunction with situational contexts and structural influences linked to important institutions that help sustain desistance. This fundamental theme underscores the need to examine both individual motivation and the social context in which individuals are embedded.

It has taken considerable time for criminologists to arrive at this type of explanation – one whose ‘validity’ might now seem obvious. But if the combination of personal and social factors underpinning desistance (engagement of pro-social networks, overcoming drug and/or alcohol problems, gaining meaningful employment, enjoying a stable family life, being mentally and physical well, successfully dealing with issues of stigma, guilt and shame) are indeed reasonably clear, the actual convergence of any or all these elements in would-be desisters’ lives is less common than it should be. Desistance, in short, is a complex business. Some people ‘fall’ into it – just as some ‘fall’ into crime. Others consciously make the effort to desist – sometimes lapsing in minor ways, sometimes in major fashion, sometimes with catastrophic results. Still others harbour no pretense toward stopping their offending. Each of these scenarios will be evident in the lives discussed later in the book. And each life discussed will bring to light just how difficult it is to strike the right combination of personal, situational and structural factors integral to getting desistance going and for sustaining it. For now, though, we raise the question of why desistance matters. In other words, why is it important to care about or study desistance from crime? In order to respond to this question, the scope of the problem of desistance – at least in terms of street/violent offenders – needs to be understood. In addition, and perhaps more pertinently, the economic benefits of desistance also need explication. Coming to terms with these aspects will help frame the significance of desistance from crime (and the value of generative action) in clearer, more pragmatic terms.

Who are (potential) desisters?

A good place to start looking for potential desisters is within the ‘deepest’ end of the criminal justice system – specifically, in the cohort of sentenced persons released annually from prison.¹ The focus on sentenced persons is important because not everyone who goes to prison has cause to desist from crime. Some are remanded, bailed, released off court, and/or eventually found innocent of all charges. It is therefore inappropriate, at least methodologically, to include these people in the population of potential desisters. Desistance requires, at minimum, having a history of offending to desist from (see below this chapter, ‘Conceptualizing desistance’). In Australia, around 25,000 sentenced prisoners are released from prison annually. In the US the equivalent figure is about 700,000 (which excludes the several million persons released each year from US jails). In the UK around 80,000 persons per year are released from a determinate sentence (Sabol and West 2010; Ministry of Justice 2013). Of course, a good many persons released from prison do not, in fact, desist from further offending. In Australia ‘about one in four prisoners will be reconvicted within three months of being released’ (Payne 2007: xi) and around 40 per cent will return to prison under sentence within two years (SCRGSP 2013: C22). Such reincarceration rates hold for countries as diverse in their prisoner numbers as the US (Langan and Levin 2002; Pew Center on the States 2011: 1011), UK (Prison Reform Trust 2013), New Zealand (Nadescu 2008) and Canada (Bonta et al. 2003) – although the latter evinces a lower rate of reincarceration of around 30 per cent within two years of release.

In more pointed fashion – and in terms of those who are likely to have more ‘heavy lifting’ to do when it comes to desistance – one could examine the population of persons who have been sentenced to a period of imprisonment on multiple occasions. Australian Bureau of Statistics snapshot data for 30 June 2012 shows that 55 per cent of prisoners had served at least one term of ‘prior adult imprisonment under sentence’

(ABS 2013a: 21). In a study of 3352 sentenced prisoners released in Victoria in 2002–03, Holland and colleagues reported that one fifth had served four or more prior periods of imprisonment (Holland et al. 2007: 14). They also found the number (and length) of past incarceration episodes significantly influenced the rate at which people returned to custody. Specifically, ‘[f]ewer than one in five of those released from their first term of imprisonment returned to prison within two years, compared with close to two-thirds of those who had been imprisoned six or more times’ (Holland et al. 2007: 15–16). In New Zealand, a study of nearly 5000 prisoners released from April 2002 to March 2003 showed that 7 per cent ‘had served more than ten previous terms’ of imprisonment (Nadescu 2008: 13). A four-year follow-up of the cohort revealed that 30 per cent of first-time incarcerates were reimprisoned within 48 months. This again sits in stark contrast to those who had served more than ten previous periods of incarceration – 78 per cent of whom were reincarcerated during a four-year follow-up window (Nadescu 2008: 13). The message here is clear: imprisonment begets imprisonment. More accurately, serving multiple short to medium-term sentences seems substantively linked to higher prospects of reincarceration (Holland et al. 2007: 15).

Of course, the problem of incarceration and its likely impacts on desistance begins, for many, well before adulthood (the stories in this book graphically illustrate such). To that end, a significant proportion of prisoners will have been incarcerated as juveniles. In a recent survey of 214 prisoners drawn from nine adult custodial facilities in South Australia, 75 per cent reported being incarcerated in their juvenile years, with most reporting first being locked up between ages 10 and 14 years (Halsey and Groves unpublished). A much larger study by the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research reported that of the 10 to 18-year-olds first appearing before the Children’s Court in 1995 (n=5,476), 13 per cent (n=714) received at least one prison sentence in the eight-year follow-up period (Chen et al. 2005). Those whose first appearance occurred between 10 and 14 years of age were twice as likely to have received an adult custodial sentence (Chen et al. 2005: 4). In the US, data from New York State and South Carolina indicates that between 70 and 80 per cent of those serving time in a juvenile facility will likely be incarcerated for new offences in adulthood (see Mendel 2011: 10–11). In New Zealand, about half of all prisoners are likely to have first been incarcerated in their juvenile years (Nadescu 2008: 18). On any day there are around 850 juveniles in detention around Australia with around 80 per cent likely to be ‘subject to supervision (community or custodial) by a corrective services agency within seven years [of release]’. Remarkably, ‘almost half will be imprisoned as an adult’ (Payne 2007: xii). More starkly, there is evidence to suggest Indigenous young men ‘progress’ from juvenile to adult custodial facilities at rates approaching 100 per cent (Lynch et al. 2003).

Penal statistics tend always to become more alarming when viewed through the lens of Indigeneity (see Cunneen et al. 2013). In Australia, Indigenous males are far more likely than non-Indigenous males to be reincarcerated (particularly in the first six months following release) (Holland et al. 2007). This is to say nothing of the shocking (and worsening) incarceration rates for Indigenous people in Australia generally. Recent figures put the overall Indigenous adult incarceration rate at 18 times that of non-Indigenous persons (SCRGSP 2013: 8.6).² Indigenous juveniles, on the other hand, are presently incarcerated at 24 times the rate of non-Indigenous juveniles (437 as against 18 per 100,000 persons aged 10 to 17 years) (SCRGSP 2013: 15A.188). In the US, ‘Blacks’ are incarcerated at roughly ten times the rate of ‘Whites’ and at three times the rate of ‘Hispanics’ (West and Sabol 2010: 28). Gender also matters when speaking of the population of potential desisters. On the whole, females are generally less likely than males to return to prison. But it is also known that females face incredibly heavy burdens (socially and economically) when trying to rejoin the general community (Rumgay 2004). In addition, the impact on children stemming from their mother’s incarceration (whether for extended or shorter episodic periods) is likely to be more pronounced than the extended or repeat incarceration of their father (Hagen and Foster 2012). This is especially so where mothers may have formed the last – if precarious – line of defence against (total) family disintegration (Halsey and Deegan 2014).

Community correctional data gives some further clues as to the size of the population of potential desisters (and, by default, potential repeat offenders). In the 2012 December quarter, the daily average number of people under community correctional supervision in Australia was 54,312 – including, around 32,000 probationers, 12,500 parolees, and 8,200 persons on a community service order (ABS 2013b: 8). A good many of these will never receive a further community sanction (some estimates, for instance, put the general community correctional recidivism rate at a low 15 to 25 per cent). But many will end up in prison and have again to start the journey of desistance. Data from New South Wales shows that 75 per cent of the 17,000 prison receptions spanning July 2009 to December 2010 had previously served a community corrections order (with 66 per cent having served a prior custodial sentence) (Corrective Services New South Wales 2013). The US has around 4 million people on probation or parole on any day – a number roughly equivalent to the general population of Melbourne, Australia. In the UK, well over 200,000 people are on probation at any time (Ministry of Justice 2013: 12).

In sum, the combined statistics concerning a) people coming back to prison within two years of release, and b) people on probation or parole indicates there is a sizeable cohort of persons who have tried, will try again, or are trying, on any single day, to desist from crime (more on the definition of desistance later). This is to say nothing of the likely thousands of people convicted annually who do not serve a prison sentence (or who avoid probation or community service) but who nonetheless reoffend (those convicted and fined for driving offences are apposite here).

But this, of course, is still only a small fraction of the larger world of desistance – or what might be called ‘the community of desisters’.³ This community also extends to the family members and/or circle of friends in would-be or ‘socially certified’ desisters’ lives. On that count alone, one could imagine that the horizon of desistance (ex-offenders and their support persons) in Australia, stretches out to at least a few hundred thousand persons. Internationally, that community would likely number in the millions. Prevalence data from the US Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that as at the end of 2001 there were 1,319,000 people in state and federal prisons. Beyond this, though, there were 4,299,000 persons who, since 1974, had ever been incarcerated – about 1.2 million of whom were still under some form of community correctional supervision (leaving around 3 million ‘free’ former incarcerates) (Bonczar 2003). Taking the early 1970s as the base, and working on a 4 to 1 ratio (i.e., four ‘ever incarcerated’ persons living in the community for every incarcerated person) would mean, very roughly, that the desisting or would-be desister population sits around 320,000 persons in the UK, 120,000 in Australia, 60,000 in Canada and about 40,000 such persons in New Zealand. Each of these individuals is positioned somewhere on the persistence–desistance continuum.

Economics of desistance

Beyond the fact that (potential) desisters and their support persons constitute an important fraction of the general population, there are other good reasons to be intensely interested in desistance. The best reason – the humanitarian reason – is to help minimize the cycles of pain, hardship and trauma which so often accompany repeat offending and reincarceration. Desistance from crime enhances the social and cultural fabric and improves the personal and familial circumstances of people’s lives. Accordingly, the political value of desistance – a potentially powerful (if underutilized) rallying point for leaders and policy-makers – is that it has the capacity to increase levels of community safety. But there is another reason to be concerned with desistance and it is one that avoids tedious debate around whether offenders ‘deserve’ a second (or even third, fourth, etc.) chance to ‘make good’ (Maruna 2001). Desistance should be championed because it makes economic sense.

Since 2002, the average daily prison population in Australia has increased by nearly one third (31 per cent) from 22,492 to 29,381 (ABS 2013a: 9). This is almost four times the rate of growth occurring in the general population over the same period.⁴ Managing prisoners is a very expensive business. In 2011–12, the national real net operating expenditure⁵ on prisons totalled just over $2.4 billion⁶ (SCRGSP 2013, Table 8A.8).⁷ This figure excludes, it should be noted, the $103 million spent annually on moving prisoners around (that is, transport and escort services) (SCRGSP 2013, Table 8A.6).⁸ In the same period, the real net operating expenditure for community corrections was $452 million (SCRGSP 2013: Table 8A.10) – a division that manages, on any day, nearly double the number of people in prisons, and which does so at one-fifth the cost. In a major Australian study, Allard et al. (2014) examined the economic costs of offending at ages 10 to 25 associated with a cohort of 41,377 individuals. Total costs (including policing, adjudicating, incarcerating, supervising offenders in the community, and supporting victims of crime) amounted to more than $1.1 billion across the group (Allard et al. 2014: 95). The really crucial determination, though, was that just under five per cent of the cohort ‘accounted for 41.1 per cent of the total costs’ (Allard et al. 2014: 94). This small subsection – labelled ‘adolescent onset (chronic)’ and ‘early onset (chronic)’ offenders – ‘consumed’ a vastly disproportionate quantum of resources to ‘address’ their offending. In fact, they ‘cost . . . over 20 times more than individuals in the two low offending groups’ with roughly $220,000 spent on each chronic offender (Allard et al. 2014: 94). The young men in this book fall squarely, as shall be seen, into these chronic categories. In fact, compared with the majority of offenders in the Allard et al. (2014) study, the costs associated with the offending of the young men in our study are likely to be much higher both on account of their crimes and on account of their considerable custodial periods. For example, the cost of incarcerating for 12 of the 14 young men in their juvenile years amounted to around $12 million.⁹

The Prison Reform Trust in the UK cites data from the National Audit Office showing ‘Reoffending by all recent ex-prisoners in 2007–08 cost the economy between GBP9.5 and GBP13 billion’ (Prison Reform Trust 2013: 1). A major recent report on recidivism in the US determined that ‘If [ . . . ] the 10 states with the greatest potential cost savings reduced their recidivism rates by 10 per cent, they could save more than $470 million in a single year’ (Pew Center on the States 2011: 26). The US correctional budget currently stands at more than US$50 billion per annum with ‘one in every eight state employees work[ing] for a corrections agency’ (Pew Center on the States 2011: 5). For every US$14 of public money spent, one dollar is spent on state and/or federal corrections (prisons, community supervision, and the like). The cost of running police, courts and prisons in the US in 2007 was just short of a staggering US$230 billion (Kyckelhahn 2011).

As with the US and UK, the bulk of the annual criminal justice budget in Australia goes to policing. In 2011–12, $9.4 billion (of a total justice sector budget of $14 billion) was spent on police services ($7.2 billion of which was devoted to salaries and payments) (SCRGSP 2013: 6.5 and C.9). Notionally, at least, the detection and apprehension of offenders makes up a sizeable proportion of police work – with repeat offenders accounting for a disproportionate amount of resources. In fact, around 20 per cent of offenders proceeded against by police in 2010–11 were subject to a proceeding on two or more separate occasions. In New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory, five per cent were subject to four separate proceedings in a 12-month period (SCRGSP 2013: C21). The costs associated with juvenile offenders are substantial as well. ‘Total recurrent expenditure on detention-based supervision, community-based supervision and group conferencing was approximately $640.1 million across Australia in 2011–12’. This represented around 20 per cent of the total annual budget allocated for out-of-home care and child protection services – a budget which has increased by more than three quarters of a billion dollars over the past five years (SCRGSP 2013: 15.15–15.16). Keeping kids incarcerated cost nearly $400 million during the 2011–12 period (SCRGSP 2013: 15.67).

In light of the monumental costs associated with policing, judging, confining and supervising offenders, it seems obvious that increases in desistance from crime have the potential to free up large portions of public funds.¹⁰ Allard et al. (2014: 83), noting the work of Cohen and Piquero (2009), observe ‘The value of saving a 14-year-old high-risk youth from a life of crime was found to be between US$2.6 and US$5.3 million in 2007’. In the period spanning mid-2009 to the end of 2010, roughly two-thirds of all prisoner receptions in New South Wales were found, immediately prior to admission into custody, to be on ‘Centrelink benefits’ (equivalent to social security, health or housing benefits in the US and UK) (Correctional Services New South Wales 2013). Assuming an average benefit payment of $240 per week, that all admissions were unique individuals, and that all avoided incarceration for 18 months, such persons (n=12,922) would each have received just under $19,000 – a collective public tariff of around $242 million. However, if the same cohort all spent 18 months in prison, the cost would amount to around $113,000 per person or $1.46 billion (based on the 2010–11 cost per day per prisoner of $207). Even with various caveats (such as the fact that many will be released after only a few days), this very simple numbers game is a salutary exercise in thinking about the relationship between public expenditure and socially beneficial outcomes. Why, as a society, would we not invest more directly in the things that keep people out of prison rather than waiting until the horse has well and truly bolted? Something, as previously mentioned, is broken.

Beyond the numbers game

Arguably, to bring about positive changes in rates of desistance one has to move well beyond a broad statistical understanding of crime and rates of return to custody. In particular, we believe it is essential to appreciate what works well (and not so well) in real people’s struggles to desist from crime. There are a host of factors small and large which police, court and corre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction
• 1. Setting the Scene
• 2. Approach to the Field – Data
• 3. On Track
• 4. Recurring Breakdown
• 5. Major Derailment
• 6. Catastrophic Turn
• 7. Points of Unrest
• 8. Points of Light
• Concluding Remarks
• Notes
• References
• Index