Why People Stop
(Persistent) Offending...
and how judges can help?
Fergus McNeill
Professor of Criminology & Social Work
Universities of Glasgow
1
Fergus.McNeill@glasgow.ac.uk
Why is stopping hard?
• Backgrounds to and resources for change
• ‘…I am finding out a great deal about myself. I am making new
relationships and living in a world totally unknown to me. I
love it yet there are times when I hate it. I am torn between
two worlds – alienated from the old one and a stranger in this
new one’ (Jimmy Boyle 1985, The Pain of Confinement: Prison
Diaries, London: Pan Books, p80.)
• ‘To the extent that felons belong to a distinct class or status
group, the problems of desistance from crime can be
interpreted as problems of mobility – moving felons from a
stigmatized status as outsiders to full democratic participation
as stakeholders’ (Uggen et al., 2006: 283)
Desistance Research
• Not ‘what works?’, but how and why
people stop
– Not teaching methods but learning processes
• Conceptualising desistance
– A process not an event
– Spontaneous (fade out or burn out) and/or
assisted desistance (helped out)
– Primary and secondary desistance
Age and
Maturation
Interactionist
accounts
Subjectivities,
Narratives,
Identities
Life
Transitions,
Social Bonds
Why supporting
desistance matters
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One model of the process
Giordano et al (2002)
1. General cognitive openness to change
2. Exposure and reaction to ‘hooks for change’
3. Availability of an appealing conventional self
4. Transformation in attitudes to deviant behaviour
Successful social integration?
Some key lessons about
desistance journeys
• They are complex processes, not events, characterised by
ambivalence and vacillation
• The involve re-biography (at the time or post hoc) ; changing
identities (narratives); more than learning new cognitive skills
• Prompted by life events, depending on the meaning of those
events for the offender; inherently subjective, hence
individualised, sensitive to difference/diversity
• Solicited or sustained by someone ‘believing in’ the offender (or
prevented by someone giving up on the offender?)... Hope
• An active process in which agency is discovered and exercised
• Requires social capital (opportunities) as well as human capital
(capacities/skills)
• Certified through ‘redemption’ or restoration (de-labelling);
finding purpose in generative activities [constructive reparation ]
Supporting desistance 1
• Expect and manage setbacks, lapses and relapses
• If desistance is an inherently individualised and subjective process,
then approaches to supervision must accommodate and exploit
issues of identity and diversity (Weaver and McNeill 2010).
• The development and maintenance not just of motivation but also
of hope become key tasks for practitioners (Farrall and Calverley
2006).
• Desistance can only be understood within the context of human
relationships; not just relationships between practitioners and
offenders (though these matter a great deal) but also between
offenders and those who matter to them (Burnett and McNeill
2005; McNeill 2006), and between ex-offenders and the
communities into which they seek to integrate (Uggen et al, 2006).
Supporting desistance 2
• Although ‘offender management’ tends to focus on offenders’ risk
and needs, they also have strengths and resources that they can
use to overcome obstacles to desistance – both personal strengths
and resources and strengths and resources in their social networks.
Supervision needs to support and develop these capacities (Maruna
and LeBel 2003).
• Since desistance is about discovering agency, interventions need to
encourage and respect self-determination; this means working with
offenders not on them (McCulloch 2005; McNeill 2006).
• Interventions based only on human capital (or developing
offenders’ capacities and skills) will not be enough. Corrections
needs to work on social capital issues with communities and
offenders (Farrall 2002, 2004; McNeill and Maruna 2007; McNeill
and Whyte 2007) and with communities of ex-offenders?
A role for judges?
• Problem solving courts
– ‘the notion of an impartial arbitrator is replaced with a
caring, but authoritarian, guardian’ (Payne, 2005, p.74).
– Oregon: Recidivism rates differed widely among judges,
with reductions of recidivism varying from 4 per cent to 42
per cent (Finigan et al., 2007).
– A review of specialist courts in different jurisdictions
commissioned by the then Department of Constitutional
Affairs concluded that judicial monitoring of offenders was
related to their success (Plotnikoff and Woolfson, 2005).
Judges, desistance and
reintegration
• Wexler (2001)
– Judicial involvement in specialist courts can promote rehabilitation by
contributing to the ‘desistance narratives’ (Maruna, 2001) that help to
facilitate and sustain desistance from crime.
• McIvor (2009)
– Exchanges that take place between sentencers and offenders in drug
court can enhance procedural justice – the fairness and transparency
with which legal proceedings are conducted (Tyler, 1990) - which
confers greater legitimacy upon judges and increases the
responsiveness of participants to exhortations that they should
change.
• Gottfredson et al. (2007)
– Judicial review directly reduced drug use and indirectly reduced
criminal behaviour by increasing participants’ perceptions of
procedural fairness.
Discussion
1. To what extent should judges sentence for desistance?
2. How and to what extent should judges be involved in
the ongoing oversight of sentences?
3. To what extent is supporting desistance (for example
via review hearings) a job for judges?
4. What about retribution, denunciation and general
deterrence? Is it sometimes just to pass sentences
that we might reasonably foresee as frustrating
desistance?
5. To what extent do victims and communities have an
interest in desistance? Does what offenders do next
matter to them?
To source references see:
• McNeill, F. (2009) Towards Effective
Practice in Offender Supervision.
Glasgow: Scottish Centre for Crime
and Justice Research, available at:
http://www.sccjr.ac.uk/documents/
McNeil_Towards.pdf
• McNeill, F. (2009) ‘What Works and
What’s Right’ European Journal of
Probation 1(1): 21-40, available at:
http://www.ejprob.ro/index.pl/what_
works_and_whats_just
• McNeill, F. and Weaver. B. (2010)
Changing Lives? Desistance Research
and Offender Management.
Glasgow: Scottish Centre for Crime
and Justice Research, available soon
at: http://www.sccjr.ac.uk/