Tags are keywords. I put tags on every post to help you find the content you want. Tags may be people (Dominic Raab, say), organisations (The Howard League, PRT), themes (women offenders, homelessness) or specific items (heroin, racial disparity, ROTL). If you’re looking to research a particular issue, they can be invaluable.
In my view, implementing rapid sanctions alone is unlikely to promote reduced drug use or offending. Desistance and recovery rarely involve a simple, linear path to success. If every relapse is met with 5 days in custody, it is hard to envisage how offenders will achieve the long term stability and abstinence required to build a personally fulfilling and law-abiding lifestyle.
The main argument in favour of allowing prisoners to vote is that we need to do everything we can to give offenders a stake in society and disenfranchising them merely adds to a general social exclusion and hinders the desistance process. But if the UK is out of step with Europe, the situation in the USA is far more extreme.
The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) just published a new YouTube video which tells you everything you need to know about desistance in 5 minutes and 28 seconds. Featuring the “greats” of the field – Shadd Maruna, Fergus McNeill, Claire Lightowler & Stephen Farrall.
The latest edition of the British Journal of Community Justice is a special issue dedicated to Transforming Rehabilitation. It is more than double its normal length and has been made available for free online. You can also order the print edition for just £5 (+£2 p&p).
Measuring drug recovery is problematic, to say the least. Recovery from drug dependence is, like desistance from crime, rarely a linear process and typically includes lapse and relapse over many years. Different people choose different recovery goals: some people remain abstinent from all substances for life; others continue to use occasionally; or replace drug dependence with a reliance on alcohol.
SPCR is a longitudinal cohort study of 3,849 adult prisoners in England and Wales sentenced to up to four years in prison. Interviews were conducted with offenders on reception to prison, in the weeks prior to release, and in the community approximately two months after release. Participants were matched to the Police National Computer (PNC), allowing reconviction rates to be calculated.
A focus on reoffending could mean we miss the “teachable moments” which enable change…
Mark Johnson, Founder and CEO of User Voice, gives his views in the latest in a series of interviews about the MoJ’s probation reform programme: Transforming Rehabilitation. Mark questions the commercial basis of TR and says that the focus on re-offending misses the main point about enabling behaviour change – further offences provide the best opportunity for getting people on the road to desistance.
What works? One of the positive side-effects of the Transforming Rehabilitation project (launched in earnest yesterday) has been the debate it has provoked about what
Fergus McNeill, @fergus_mcneill, leading academic on desistance – how and why offenders give up committing crime – writes on why he tweets. Tweets by @fergus_mcneill Why
Some things in life are complicated. Take, for example, deciding the causes of the August riots. The government, Metropolitan Police and the Guardian/LSE are just
