Shadd Maruna Queen’s University Belfast Twitter: @Criminology s.maruna@qub.ac.uk

1. Criminological interventions without “correctionalism”?: rethinking “Evidence based practice” in criminal justice Shadd Maruna Queen’s University Belfast Twitter: @Criminology s.maruna@qub.ac.uk

2. Correctional vs. Appreciative Lenses Whose Side Are We On? Correctional: “The goal of ridding ourselves of the deviant phenomenon, however Utopian” Appreciative: “To appreciate the variety of deviant enterprises requires a temporary or permanent suspension of conventional morality”

3. Problems of Correctionalism • Myth of social “pathology” • “A basic difficulty with a correctional perspective is that it systematically interferes with the capacity to empathize and thus comprehend the subject of inquiry” (15). • “Though for decades, correctional personnel promised to treat their clientele, for the most part they remained discontentedly accustomed merely to patrolling and supervising their domains.”

4. Administrative Criminology & The Scapegoating of the Poor “In its avid concern for public order and safety, implemented through police force and penal policy, Leviathan is vindicated. By pursuing evil and producing the appearance of good, the state reveals its abiding method – the perpetuation of its good name in the face of its own propensities for violence, conquest and destruction. Guarded by a collective representation in which theft and violence reside in a dangerous class, morally elevated by its correctional quest, the state achieves the legitimacy of pacific intention and the appearance of legality – even if it goes to war and massively perpetrates activities it has allegedly banned from the world” (197).

5. Spirit of 1968

7. Correctionalism Won! The Era of “Evidence Based Practice?” Described as the Millenium’s “big idea” “Let me be clear: this administration shares your belief in the power of evidence-based research to help address some of our nation’s most significant challenges. President Obama has renewed our nation’s commitment to rely on science in the development of public policy. He understands, as I do, that sound judgement derives from solid evidence.” • U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, National Institute of Justice Annual Conf, 2009

9. But what is Evidence Based Practice? “Mom + The Flag + Warm Apple Pie = Evidence Based Practice” (Donaldson, 2009, p. 5)

10. Wat is op bewijs gebaseerde praktijk?

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12. + op bewijs gebaseerde praktijk

13. Delimiting the Concept “The intervention community must generate consensus and endow the label ‘evidence based’ with reliable and valid meaning. A failure to do so would place politicians in a position similar to consumers when shopping for ‘natural’ foods’ they would be forced to study a program’s jargonistic packaging to understand how and to what degree it is ‘evidence based’” (Dodge & Mandel, 2012, p. 526)

14. But Not Too Narrowly “Evidence based practice is not a synonym for using research in practice as many practitioners and supporters assume but is in fact a set of epistemological assumptions that include evidence hierarchies and systematic reviews” (Marks, 2002). “The Evidence Based Movement is outrageously exclusionary and dangerously normative with regards to scientific knowledge” (Holmes et al, 2006).

15. The Big Question “Evidence-based policy is dominated by one question. Attend a conference, read a textbook, peruse a proposal, buy a tee-shirt on the said topic and somewhere in headline font appears the phrase ‘what works?’” (Pawson, 2006: 20)

16. What “What Works” Research Is • Program Evaluations • Random Control Trials • Meta-Analyses and Systematic Reviews • Determining whether participants in an intervention on aggregate have better outcomes than non-participants.

17. What “What Works” Usually Means • “The average effects found in these studies not especially large. The overall mean effect is a reduction in recidivism of between 5 and 10 per cent, though some individual studies report effect sizes considerably larger than this. … The effect size of aspirin on risk of myocardial infarction is surprisingly low at 0.034; that of bypass surgery on the risk of death from coronary heart disease is 0.15. Such relatively modest effects are nevertheless considered sufficient justification for the extensive use of these interventions in healthcare services.” (McGuire, 2000, 4).

18. Does one have to do ‘correctional’ research to contribute to evidence based practice? In other words: Can appreciative research contribute to evidence based practice?

19. What is Desistance Research? Appreciative Approach: Learning from success stories. Understanding how and why people can leave criminal behaviours behind “Life course” research based on longitudinal or retrospective studies of lives over time.

20. The Age-Crime Curve Figure 1 Recorded Offender Rates per 1,000 Relevant Population by Age-year and Sex, England and Wales, 2000

21. An estimated*85% of “offenders” desist from crime before they turn 30 (Blumstein & Cohen, 1987) Based on prospective longitudinal studies like David Farrington’s Cambridge Study of Delinquent Development *impossible to ever accurately measure All Downhill After 30

22. What’s the Difference? Imagine you wanted to lose weight. You might be interested in knowing which of the dozens of available dieting models, diet pills, etc, have been empirically shown to be effective (this is “what works”). You might also be interested in talking to individuals who were themselves able to successfully lose weight and keep it off (that’s “desistance”)

23. You Think Rehabilitation is Hard? In lectures, Harvard Nutrition Professor Frank Sacks says he is often challenged about these bleak findings: “People would say, ‘How can you say all these diets have no effect when I lost 100 pounds on diet X?’” Dr. Sacks believes them. He knows people who have lost weight and kept it off with diets, including a colleague in his department. “He lost 30 or 40 pounds in the 1970s and kept it off all these years,” Dr. Sacks said. But why him and not someone else following the same regimen? “Beats me,” Dr. Sacks said (Kolata, 2016).

24. The Age-Crime Curve Figure 1 Recorded Offender Rates per 1,000 Relevant Population by Age-year and Sex, England and Wales, 2000

25. What Works / Desistance from Stuttering • Around 5 per cent of children stutter at some point (Bloodstein, 1995) • There has been a long ugly history of “cures” that have “failed” (see King’s Speech) • Between 50 and 75 per cent of these will desist without formal treatment within a few years (Mansson, 2007). Even teens who stutter usually desist by age 17 (Finn & Felsenfeld, 2006)

26. “Desistance-Focused Treatment” in Speech Therapy • Researchers studied the parenting styles of parents of successfully desisting children (Lankford & Cooper, 1974) • Consequently treatment interventions (e.g., Onslow, 1990) explicitly drew on these findings from the ‘natural recovery’ literature in designing their formal treatments. • These have now been found successful using RCT’s (“what works”) (e.g., Bothe et al, 2006)

27. What is NOT desistance-focused practice?

28. Desistance-Focused Practice? John McKnight describes a jail tour he was on where he looked down on a room full of over 1000 inmates... “Some watched the television, some talked, some played cards, many stared. Almost all of them were young. ... Except for meals, one hour in a small yard outdoors, and cell time, they spent all their time in this room.”

29. …“You may not realise this”, the governor said, “but you are observing the only method of rehabilitation that we are sure works. These men are ageing. When they reach a certain time in their late twenties and early thirties, they will stop engaging in the behaviour that brought them here. You see, the one thing we know for sure is that as people grow older their tendency to engage in most types of violent crimes rapidly declines” (McKnight, 1995).

30. The Drift from Delinquency Figure 1 Recorded Offender Rates per 1,000 Relevant Population by Age-year and Sex, England and Wales, 2000

31. Dissecting Maturity into its component parts It is not enough to say that ageing causes desistance. Theories need to “unpack” the “meaning” of age (Sampson & Laub, 1992). One must ask which features indexed by age “constitute the mediating mechanisms” at work in this process (Michael Rutter, 1996: 608).

32. Factors known to be related to desistance • Stable relationships, families (Bersani& van Schellen, 2013; Blokland & De Schipper, 2016) • Stable employment (Ramakers, Nieuwbeerta, Van Wilsem & Dirkzwager, 2017) • Move away from same-age, same-gender peers (Warr, 1998; Hill, 2017) • Feelings of responsibility, hope and self-efficacy (Liem & Kunst, 2013; Kaptein& van Helvoort, 2018) • Increasing concern for others, esp. caring for one’s children (Doekhie, van Ginneken, Dirkzwager, et al., 2018; Rodermond, Kruttschnitt, Slotboom, & Bijleveld, 2016).

33. Desistance and Criminal Justice Farrall (1995) writes, “Most of the research suggests that desistance ‘occurs’ away from the criminal justice system. That is to say that very few people actually desist as a result of intervention on the part of the criminal justice system or its representatives” (p. 56).

34. Factors that might impede these normative processes • Stable families – INCARCERATION • Stable employment – INCARCERATION • Move away from same-age, same-sex peers – INCARCERATION • Responsibility – INCARCERATION • Increasing concern for others, esp. caring for one’s children -- INCARCERATION Prison effects research (see Bevens, Dirkzwager & Korf, 2014; Boone, 2011; Kurtovic& Rovira, 2017; Dokhie, Dirkzwager & Nieuwbeerta, 2017)

35. The Desistance “Paradigm” “Put simply, the implication is that offender management services need to think of themselves less as providers of correctional treatment (that belongs to the expert) and more as supporters of desistance processes (that belong to the desister)” (Fergus McNeill, 2006)

36. The Self-Change Paradox “How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? Only one, but the lightbulb has to really want to change” (Old joke) False Dichotomy: One either “desists on their own” or else is “professionally treated” Desistance and “constrained agency” (van Ginneken, 2017)

37. The Shift to DesistanceChanging to an Appreciative Lens • From “programmes” to lives • From “What Works?” to “How Does it Work?” • From a medical model to an organic/ “naturalistic” model • From “treatment effects” to relationships • From expert outsiders to the wisdom of ‘wounded healers’ • From correcting deficits to building strengths

38. Desistance Based Practice in Action • Disengagement from so-called “terrorist” engagement (Bovenkerk, 2011) or “gangs” (Roks, 2018); • Restorative justice (see Blad, 2013; Aertsen, Daems & Robert, 2013); • Drug addiction recovery (Liebregts, van der Pol, de Graaf, van Laar, van den Brink, & Korf, 2015) • Reintegration after life imprisonment (Liem & Kunst, 2013) • Reintegration of sex offenders (see Höing, Vogelvang& Bogaerts, 2017; Lussier, 2016; De VriesRobbé, M., Mann, R. E., Maruna, S., & Thornton, D, 2015) • Working with punitive public attitudes (Butter, Hermanns & Menger, 2013; Van Marle and Maruna, 2010) • Narrative victimology (Pemberton, Mulder & Aarten, 2018)

39. 15 Minutes of Fame in Criminal Justice • Widely cited in the UK Ministry of Justice’s 2011 Green Paper • Merseyside Probation has convened a Desistance Planning Team (2014) • HM High Down Prison declared itself a “desistance-focused prison” (2013) • Avon and Somerset Probation Trust recruited a dedicated Desistance Development Officer (2013)

40. We all may be “Crime Fighters” after all “Why Crime Went Away” Time Magazine, 2010 “Criminologists typically point to age demographics to explain crime drop.” “Violence is typically a young man’s vice; it has been said that the most effective crime-fighting tool is a 30th birthday.”

41. Thanks for listening Prof. Shadd Maruna s.Maruna@qub.ac.uk Twitter: @criminology