• Af*er Crime and Punishment Pathways to offender reintegration Edited by Shadd Maruna and Russ Immarigeon After Crime and Punishment Pathways to offender reintegration Edited by Shadd Maruna and Russ Immarigeon WILLAN PUBLISHING Published by Willan Publishing Culmcott House Mill Street, Uffculme Cullompton, Devon EX15 3AT, UK Tel: +44(0)1884 840337 Fax: +44(0)1884 840251 e-mail: info©willanpublishing.co.uk website: www.willanpublishing.co.uk Published simultaneously in the USA and Canada by Willan Publishing c/o ISBS, 920 NE 58th Ave, Suite 300, Portland, Oregon 97213-3786, USA Tel: +001(0)503 287 3093 Fax: +001(0)503 280 8832 e-mail: [email protected] website: www.isbs.com © the Editors and Contributors 2004 All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the Publishers or a licence permitting copying in the UK issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE. First published 2004 ISBN 1-84392-057-3 (paper) ISBN 1-84392-058-1 (cased) British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Project management by Deer Park Productions, Tavistock, Devon Typeset by GCS, Leighton Buzzard, Beds Printed and bound by T.J. International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall Contents List of figures and tables v Foreivord by Neal Shover vii Notes on contributors xii Part I: Desistance Theory and Reintegration Practice 1 Ex-offender reintegration: theory and practice 3 Shadd Maruna, Russ Immarigeon and Thomas P. LeBel 2 Reintegration and restorative justice: towards a theory and practice of informal social control and support 27 Gordon Bazemore and Carsten Erbe 3 Social capital and offender reintegration: making probation desistance focused 57 Stephen Farrall Part II: Methodological Considerations 4 Connecting desistance and recidivism: measuring changes in criminality over the lifespan 85 Shawn D. Bushway, Robert Brame and Raymond Paternoster After Crime and Punishment 5 Somewhere between persistence and desistance: the intermittency of criminal careers 102 Alex R. Piquero Part III: Applied Research on Desistance 6 Jail or the army: does military service facilitate desistance from crime? 129 Leana Allen Bouffard and ]ohn H. Laub 7 To reoffend or not to reoffend? The ambivalence of convicted property offenders 152 Ros Burnett 8 Desistance from crime: is it different for women and girls? 181 Gill Mclvor, Cathy Murray and janet Jamieson Part IV: Desistance-focused Reintegration Research 9 Beating the perpetual incarceration machine: overcoming structural impediments to re-entry 201 Stephen C. Richards and Richard S. Jones 10 With eyes wide open: formalizing community and social control intervention in offender reintegration programmes 233 Faye S. Taxman, Douglas Young and James M. Byrne 11 'Less than the average citizen': stigma, role transition and the civic reintegration of convicted felons 261 Christopher Uggen, JeffManza and Angela Behrens Index 294 iv List of figures and tables Figures 2.1 Some restorative decision-making processes 34 2.2 Restorative justice: redefining the government's role 37 2.3 Treatment/remedial model 45 2.4 Restorative/relational model 46 7.1 Pre-release desistance optimism and post-release criminal outcomes 161 10.1 The re-entry partnership continuum 242 10.2 Evidence-based principles of re-entry programming 246 11.1 Roles and identity transformation of convicted felons across socioeconomic, familial and civic domains 264 Tables 2.1 Restorative justice practice, location and objectives 30 3.1 Emerging desistance 64 5.1 Research issues related to the study of intermittency 117 6.1 Percentage of delinquents with adult police contact by military service 138 6.2 Logistic regression models predicting adult police contacts among delinquents 139 After Crime and Punishment 6.3 Average age of last contact by military service 140 6.4 Regression models predicting age of last police contact 141 6.5 Percentage of serious delinquents with adult police contact and average age of last contact by military service 143 6.6 Logistic regression models predicting adult police contacts among serious juvenile delinquents 144 6.7 Regression models predicting age at last police contact among serious juvenile delinquents 145 7.1 Anticipated obstacles to desisting from crime 159 7.2 Offences which did not result in a further custodial sentence 160 7.3 Reoffending related to age and number of previous convictions 160 7.4 Pre-release anticipation of obstacles by post-release outcomes 163 7.5 Patterns of persistence and desistance 165 vi Foreword Belief that prison confinement is a critical contingency in the lives of offenders who experience it is shared by analysts across the political spectrum. Seen from the left, it dehumanizes and diminishes indi­ viduals, leaves them less capable of finding a satisfying conventional niche and, more likely therefore, to break the law. Those on the right argue the contrary. As they see it, a taste of 'the joint' is an effective nostrum for turning offenders and others away from the path of transgression; put simply, it gives the former and all who witness their misfortune something to think about. But while imprisonment is a commonplace occurrence in the lives of street criminals, empirical interest in its long-term and cumulative effects has rarely sustained for long the attention of investigators. Until recently, remarkably few bothered even to consider its potential significance for their own work. The reasons for this oversight can be seen in context of developments in late-twentieth-century domestic and global economic relationships, in criminal justice and in criminological thought. In the USA, this period saw prolonged wage stagnation for working citizens, deindustriali­ zation of central cities, a significant shift of tax burdens to middle- income families and small businesses, and increasing income inequality between the wealthiest and poorest segments of the population. As for criminal justice, the crime control net was widened, its mesh was thinned and, increasingly, it was cast in the imagery and rhetoric of warfare. The list of specific changes in criminal justice is a long one but it includes a fundamental restructuring of sentencing laws, resurrection of the death penalty, a near five-fold increase in the rate of imprisonment, privatization of new expanses of policing and corrections, and appellate vii After Crime and Punishment judicial decisions ratifying more repressive crime control measures. And all this ignores the emergence and spread of new surveillance technologies, both electronic and behavioural. Historic transformations of this magnitude inevitably must be interpreted and justified by an equally profound shift in the way crime and criminals are understood. Consequently, the rightward turn in practice was underpinned by a refashioned image of street offenders. No longer were they and their crimes seen as products of dysfunctional criminogenic circumstances. Instead, neoconservative analysts pressed the claim that whatever the so-called 'root causes' of crime might be, they necessarily operate through the calculus of decision-making. And since the former were said to be largely beyond the reach of public policies, the new focus should be on criminal decision-making and policies that constrain it. Spurred by and finding justification in these suggestions, many political leaders and policy analysts quickly came to see street criminals as rational actors, albeit deficient in self-control or infected with a newly discovered virus of 'criminality'. 'Career criminals' and the criminal career perspective occupied centre stage. Employing conceptual inventions and distinctions of uncertain merit, the criminal career paradigm was built on pessimistic and over- deterministic assumptions about offenders. Less concerned with theory than policy, its proponents assumed and focused on persistence in offending. Their confidence was based largely on descriptive analyses of official and archival crime data since they showed little interest in first­ hand knowledge of the lives and careers of offenders. Unreluctant volunteers in the movement to identify, convict and confine high-rate offenders, academics and policy-makers animated by notions of career criminals were not particularly interested in the potentially deleterious consequences of the new crime control. It was not a time either for squeamish civil libertarians or any who wanted to explore close up any casualties of the new criminal justice; deliverance from crime would come through faith and perseverance. Nevertheless, the corpus of empirical research into the lives and careers of street offenders, while it was not voluminous, was sufficient in quality and consistency to raise serious questions about the picture of career criminals and criminal careers on which it rested. As opposed to the notion of career continuity and a constant rate of criminal participation, for example, research by Daniel Glaser and his students three decades earlier had shown that when viewed over time many offenders display a zig-zag pattern of criminality. Career continuity in their sample of men released from federal prisons was the exception. Foreword Due in no small measure to its demonstrated shortcomings, the criminal career paradigm lost much of its lustre, and in its place we have seen the ascendance of developmental and life-course approaches to offenders' lives and crimes. This book and similar work by others in recent years are signs that neglect of offenders once they enter the prison has come to an end. Not only in North America but in Europe and Asia as well a growing number of investigators have turned their attention to the longitudinal dynamics of criminal careers. Informed by knowledge and perspectives from several disciplines, life-course investigators work with a stock of concepts that includes risk factors, cycles, turning points, transitions and trajectories. Much of their work is focused on offenders' early years, but there has been a rekindling of interest in the tail end of criminal careers also. The focus now spans decades, from childhood to dotage. Justification for these developments is grounded in the fact that few men and women past the age of 40 or so - it is difficult to be precise about these things - regardless of how serious their criminal records might be, continue showing up in police stations, courts and prisons. Desistance is the label that has come to be applied to this statistical relationship between ageing and participation in serious street crime. The concept admittedly is presumptive; when applied to individuals, it is clear that the break with crime is not always clean cut and final. In real life, desistance frequently is gradual, drawn out over years and interrupted by occasional relapse, at least in the short run. In place of the one-sided and distorted emphasis on criminal continuity characteristic of the criminal career approach, life-course investigators have demonstrated in offenders' lives positive changes and a turning away from earlier habits. Desistance research clearly offers an opportunity to correct the theoretically incomplete and disingenuous policy approach to crime control characteristic of recent years. Justified by a theory of crime as choice, the harsher criminal justice was aimed almost exclusively at increasing the risk of criminal participation. This, however, ignores the theoretically obvious: offenders can be and are changed not only by manipulating threat but also by increasing their legitimate oppor­ tunities. It is poor science and poor public policy to ignore this fact. To do so is to ensure that policy-makers are not presented with the full range of options, some of which certainly are more effective and efficient than others. Investigations of desistance hold great potential for correcting this one-sided concern with the effects of risk by widening the analytic focus to the entire array of forces that cause men and women to turn away from serious criminal participation. ix