Shadd Maruna is a Reader in Criminology at Queen’s University Belfast and an internationally acclaimed writer on the subjects of reintegration and reducing re-offending.
Corrections News caught up with him while he was in Wellington for Prison Fellowship’s conference "When the Prisoner Comes Home" on 11-13 May.
It’s something of a clich? ;these days that reintegration is supposed to start the moment someone enters prison, but prisons by their very nature are difficult places to start reintegration!
Prison does a very bad job of being like the real world, but it should be made as much like the real world as possible. For example, more democratic regimes are better. For adult prisoners, very structured regimes that take away all discretion are very infantilising and not good for reintegration.
I think if you’re going to incarcerate, every eye should be on the release date from the very beginning - these people are going to be out eventually.
At the moment the "golden rule" of recidivism, whether in smaller countries such as Iceland or Malta, or in larger countries such as the US, seems to be that 50 - 75 percent of people will always re-offend no matter what you do. But reintegration is in an exploratory phase. We haven’t got any studies that point where we could say for certain that this "works". We just have practices that show the best likelihood of working and some evidence.
But I have some gut feelings. For example, wrap-around community based programmes seem to have the best likelihood of working. These offer circles of support which are often mutual - for example, ex-prisoners supporting ex-prisoners. They enlist others to help and offer an atmosphere of dignity and opportunities to change self-narratives, similar to alcoholics going to AA.
A good example is Mimi Silbert’s Delancey Street Project in San Franciso where exprisoners are helping ex-prisoners. They run a hotel and a restaurant and people who go there know they’ll be expected to work really hard, but it’s a place for them to prove themselves. There are a lot of other similar projects that are less famous, but there’s not much evaluation research on any of them as they’re voluntary.
People might say that the people who go to these sorts of projects were going to go straight and do well anyway, but I don’t buy that. It’s a process of conversion. People start with the desire to go straight but it’s a long-haul process and they need support to keep it up.
I think many people in society generally feel more comfortable believing that criminals are horrible aliens, not people, because to believe otherwise is to believe that, in the same circumstances, any of us could have done it. It’s a cognitive process where we decide "they are not like me". But there’s a lot of chance in the universe - and you and I are probably capable of doing these things.
I’m interested in unpacking whether we can live without that "them and us" idea. There are people who get on fine without believing prisoners are "other" or "alien". This "othering" is particularly bad in certain places, such as the U.S. It’s interesting to note that people’s fear of crime often comes after politicians raise the issue.
My hunch is it’s an immature view to believe prisoners are "other" or "alien" and society as a whole, and certainly prisoners, would be better off if we could all take a more mature view.
It’s also interesting that the more welleducated people are, the less punitive they are. We’ve found this in survey after survey and even after you adjust for all sorts of variables, education always holds up. Some studies find that women are less punitive than men, but in our study, we didn’t find that.
Stalin said that one death is a tragedy but a million deaths are a statistic. We often use statistics to try to convince the public about crime and justice issues, but they’re more moved by stories.
One terrible crime can change public opinion. You need "ex-con made good" stories to counter these with - then people see they’d written this person off but they’re not so bad.
We did a study of prisoners with at least three prior convictions and found that when we measured levels of hope, this was predicative of their success, or lack of it, on the outside. To many academics and practitioners, prisoners’ mindsets don’t matter so much as what happens to them, such as being given a job etc, but hope does matter. If I could grant prisoners anything it would be some belief in a better future.
Nietzsche said "he who has a strong enough why can bear almost any how". The "why" might be faith, a relationship, it’s often a child. Some people who’ve been in prison have said to me they didn’t mind so much when their kids were very small, but when their kids grew older and were being teased because their parent was in prison - that mattered to them. They didn’t want their son or daughter to have to go through that.
It’s hard to think on the spot what I’d do to give people hope, but maybe we could make a list of things that take away hope - such as "isolate people", "give them no opportunities" and then we could do the opposite!
It’s the most important new paradigm in crime and justice in the last 25 - 50 years. I’m not giving it a ringing endorsement, but I’m very interested in it. Ours is a business that needs transforming.
In Northern Ireland we’re trying to reclaim from New Zealand the title of "Restorative Justice Capital of the World". For example, in Northern Ireland, for youths under 18 it’s automatic for most cases to go through what we call youth conferencing services, and many community-based projects for adults have emerged out of the peace process. The evaluation numbers are good - both for victim satisfaction and reducing recidivism.
When people enter prison we have a lot of what we call degradation ceremonies, where things are taken away and the person changes from a citizen to a prisoner. I think, pre-release, we should be reversing this process.
We should make it deliberate, ritualistic and slow. So often the transition from prisoner back to citizen is dramatic and fast. The prisoner maybe doesn’t even know quite when it will happen. It’s almost like there’ll be a knock on the cell door and it’s "here’s your suit and ?60 and there’s the bus".
Things like self-care units, going out on day release to work make sense, so long as they’re tied to good behaviour.
The prisoner has earned their citizenship again. We need some sort of "you did it - you got through - congratulations!". If we want reintegration to be as powerful as incarceration, we need that philosophy.
Dr Shadd Maruna - "If I could grant prisoners anything it would be some belief in a better future."
Shadd Maruna is a Reader in Criminology at Queens University in Belfast. Previously he has been a lecturer at the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology and before that he was an assistant professor for three years at the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Albany, State University of New York. He holds a PhD in Human Development and Social Policy from Northwestern University (Chicago USA) and his publications largely refl ect this cross-disciplinary training. In particular, his primary interests involve theories of desistance from crime, public opinion regarding law breakers, and the implications of both on ex-offender reintegration.
His first book, Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Rebuild Their Lives (American Psychological Association Books) was named Outstanding Contribution to Criminology by the American Society of Criminology (ASC) in 2001. He is the co-editor of two new books with Willan Publishing on the subject of ex-prisoner coping and reintegration (After Crime and Punishment, 2004; The Effects of Imprisonment, 2005), and has recently co-authored the book Rehabilitation (Routledge, 2007) with Tony Ward of Victoria University of Wellington. Shadd Maruna has been a Fulbright Scholar and an HF Guggenheim Fellow. He has also been named the Distinguished New Scholar by the ASC’s Division of Corrections and Sentencing.
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