Desistance Research and Intervention Practice

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Desistance Researchand Intervention Practice

• Fergus McNeill
• Universities of Glasgow
• F.McNeill_at_lbss.gla.ac.uk

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Thinking about interventions
Social Context
Staff Skills
Intervention (RNR)
Desister
Offender
Motivation
Relation-ship
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Thinking about the desistance process
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Thinking about thedesistance process
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Understanding desistance 1

• Primary and secondary desistance
• When it comes to persistent offenders, secondary
  desistance is (or should be) the holy grail of
  offender management and resettlement
• Desistance is a process characterised by
  ambivalence and vacillation. It is not an event.
• Desistance may be provoked by aging, by related
  life events and by developing social bonds,
  depending on the meaning of those events and
  bonds for the offender.
• Desistance may be provoked by someone believing
  in the offender. Hope seems to be an important
  factor.

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Understanding desistance 2

• There is an important ongoing debate about
  whether or not desistance typically involves a
  change in narrative identities (or self-stories).
  However, it is likely that some form of narrative
  reconstruction is necessary for persistent
  offenders.
• Desistance seems to involve discovering (or
  developing) agency the ability to make choices
  and govern ones own life. Persistent offenders
  tend to be fatalistic.
• Different forms of capital are significant in the
  desistance process. Desistance probably requires
  more than just the development of human capital
  (capacities) social capital is also critical to
  the process. This suggests that intervention
  needs to be about more than sponsoring change
  within offenders.
• For many desisters, desistance is about
  redemption or restoration it often involves
  finding purpose through generative activities.

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Supporting desistance

• Interventions need to take account of
• Identity and diversity in the process
• Motivation, hope and ambivalence (affects)
• The relational contexts of change (personal and
  professional)
• Strengths and resources for overcoming obstacles
  to desistance (as opposed to risks and needs)
• The development of an agentic identity
• Social capital (as opposed to human capital)
• Interventions are part of the process, but the
  process exists before and beyond them

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Think change process first,interventions second

• Treatment intervention was birthed as an
  adjunct to recovery change, but, as treatment
  intervention grew in size and status, it
  defined recovery change as an adjunct of
  itself. The original perspective needs to be
  recaptured. Treatment intervention institutions
  need to once again become servants of the larger
  recovery change process and the community in
  which that recovery change is nested and
  sustained (White 2000, in Maruna et al 2004).

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Embedding interventions
Desistance
Case Management
Programmes
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A counsellor who helps to develop and deploy
motivation
A case manager who holds it all together
Motivation
Opportunities
Capacities (Skills)
An advocate who helps to develop and deploy
social capital
An educator who helps to develop and deploy
human capital
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What works and desistance
(McNeill, 2006)
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Conclusion

• There may be a desistance paradigm, but there can
  be no desistance programme and no desistance
  manual
• But any interventions strategies and practices
  can and must be embedded in understandings of the
  change processes that they exist to support
• And the research can direct planners and
  practitioners towards the key issues and
  questions that must be addressed in supporting
  desistance