Threats, Bribes and the
Power of Persuasion
Fergus McNeill
Professor of Criminology & Social Work
University of Glasgow
1
Fergus.McNeill@glasgow.ac.uk
Who do people comply?
(Bottoms, 2001)
Compliance
Constraint
Habitual
Instrumental
Normative
Attachment
Legitimacy
Norm
acceptance
Compliance Models
•
•
•
Allows for interactions between mechanisms
and individual differences between people,
as well as changes over time
Suggests the importance of interactions with
regulator, supervisor, agency (cf.
Braithwaite, 2003)
Legal versus psychological legitimacy (cf.
Tom Tyler’s work on procedural justice and
police legitimacy)
Motivational postures of
tax-payers (Braithwaite 2003)
Motivational
Postures
Postures of
deference
Commitment
Capitulation
Postures of
defiance
Resistance
Gameplaying
Disengagement
Desistance from crime
• Why does it matter?
– Not ‘what works?’, but how and why people
stop (in other words, how they come to
comply)
– Less about teaching methods than learning
and developmental processes in their social
context
– Primary and secondary desistance
Desistance Research
• When does it matter (in practice)?
– Purposes of CJS: Punish, help, (long-term)
change or (short-term) control?
– Desistance is principally about long-term
change (developing normative and habitual
compliance); critical to tertiary crime
reduction (i.e. reducing reoffending)
– Long term change> substantive
compliance> secondary desistance… and
cost-effectiveness
Age and
Maturation
Interactions/
Relationships
Subjectivities,
Narratives,
Identities
Life
Transitions,
Social Bonds
From Bottoms and
Shapland (2011: 70)
Key aspects of
desistance journeys
• Zig-zag processes, not events; fluctuating
motivation
• For people with entrenched criminalised
identities, they usually involve re-biography;
changing identities (narratives); more than
learning new cognitive skills
• Prompted by life events, depending on the
meaning of those events for the desister;
inherently subjective, hence individualised,
sensitive to difference/diversity
Key aspects of
desistance journeys
• Hope is powerful and can be solicited or sustained
by someone ‘believing in’the person’s potential (or
prevented by someone giving up?)…
• ‘Agency’ is discovered; people learn to direct their
own lives
• Social capital is required (opportunities, networks,
reciprocities) as well as human capital
(capacities/skills)
• Recognition matters:‘redemption’, restoration (delabelling); finding purpose in generative activities
[constructive reparation ]
Journeys and destination
• What is the positive goal or end state that criminal
justice seeks to bring about? Not just minimised
harms…
– Restored reciprocal relationships of interdependency
– A better life for better citizens in a better
community, governed by a better state?
• In the process of getting there together, we should
model the virtues and promote the goods we want
to secure
Supporting desistance
Social change
Personal
change
Principles
• Researchinformed
• Realistic
• Co-productive
• Hope
• Strengths
• Agency
•
•
•
•
Constraints
Social capital
Recognition
Reintegration
What part for IOM?
• No single definition
– A series of different constituted multi-agency initiatives which
have in common the aim of tackling (usually) high volume
property offenders from high crime areas who may or may not
be subject to statutory supervision (often focused on short
sentence ex-prisoners)
– Make them an irresistible offer: big carrot, big stick
• Three aspects (appealing to different implicit
mechanisms of compliance)
– Prevent and deter (instrumental-disincentive)
– Catch and convict (instrumental-disincentive)
– Rehabilitate and resettle (instrumental-incentive; normative)
Lessons from half a century
of rehabilitation efforts....
“First, helping people to turn their backs on a life of crime is a
slow and uncertain process. It is frequently a case of “two steps
forward, one step back”, because of the complexity of
offenders’ lives... But second, and encouragingly, most people
who become heavily involved in offending also eventually
desist from crime – completely or largely – at some stage in
their lives... Third, the most thorough research evaluations of
treatment initiatives, when they show positive results, tend to
report fairly small effects... The main implication of these
studies is that programmes of work with offenders can
accelerate the desistance process, but viewed in the round,
they tend to have only a modest impact...”
Lessons from half a century
of rehabilitation efforts....
• This is probably because the work of police, prison and
probation officers are only one of many influences on
offenders’ lives. Hence, there are several useful tools in the
rehabilitation armoury – but no ‘silver bullets’. Fourth,
rehabilitation programmes can easily become derailed,
especially when they involve complex partnerships between
several different agencies; the successful implementation of
fresh and apparently promising approaches is a real
challenge.” (Academic Reference Group’s Foreword to ‘An
evaluation of the Diamond Initiative: year two findings’,
emphases added)
Outcomes, outcomes,
outcomes....
• Reoffending in experimental group similar to control group.
Why?
• Implementation problems (undue haste)?
– Deployment of resources; Working tensions between partners
• Timescales for measuring impact too short?
– Entrenched behaviours take time to shift (cf. smoking cessation)
• Methodological flaws?
– Problems with control group match?; Project had an impact on rates
of reconviction in experimental group?
• Positive findings
– A voluntary service to prolific offenders (mean = 11 convictions), but
60% take up, and higher take-up by those most in need/at risk
Practical implications
“Perhaps the most important is that helping people to desist from
crime involves a long-term commitment; if the police, probation
service and their partners - or indeed the government - expect a
return on their investment in the space of a year or less, they will
very likely be disappointed. Second, the study has certainly
demonstrated the feasibility of involving police officers in
rehabilitative work with offenders; and we would expect the long
term effects of joint working to be beneficial both for the police
and for their partners in the probation service and elsewhere.
Third, there is an obvious value in information-sharing across
custody and community settings, yet also some serious challenges
in making this happen as smoothly as it should”.
(Academic Reference Group’s Foreword to ‘An evaluation of the
Diamond Initiative: year two findings’, emphases added)
Some big questions
• To what extent should the Police be involved in
working to ‘rehabilitate & resettle’ (and to what
extent should probation and third sector be involved
in C&C, P&D)?
• What are the implicit models of compliance that
underpin IOM work, and what evidence exists to
support them?
• Does IOM build legitimacy (with offenders and with
the public) or threaten it?
• How does IOM fit with the wider project of
rehabilitation?
Judicial
Rehabilitation
(Formal recognition
of rehabilitation/
desistance?)
Social
Rehabilitation
Moral
Rehabilitation
(Re-insertion,
reintegration, delabelling... Informal
recognition?
Trading Up?)
(Provision of evidence of
developing good
character – Making
Good/Paying Back?)
Psychological
Rehabilitation
(the development of
personality/capacity?)
Four strands, woven together
Judicial
Social
Moral
Personal
Conclusions
Principles
Personal
change
Social
change
• Desistance as a personal project
• Desistance as a social process
• Desistance as a political process
• For more information, contact:
– Fergus.McNeill@glasgow.ac.uk
• Follow the Desistance Knowledge
Exchange blog:
– http://blogs.iriss.org.uk/discoveringde
sistance