Clear approach: Peer-led approaches in Youth Offender Institutions

This article undertakes an analysis of His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons’ (HMIP) inspection reports of Young Offender Institutions (YOIs) in England over a 20-year period. The analysis is synthesised with the author’s lived experience of being both an incarcerated child in YOI and a professional working with children in custody. The analysis was instigated by a letter written by the Independent Monitoring Board (IMB) to the Rt Hon Damian Hinds, Minister of State for Justice, indicating that the current state of affairs in England’s YOIs is ‘positively inhumane.’ The current article argues that YOIs have never been ‘positively humane’, having always fallen short of ‘improving outcomes for children’, through the lens of recidivism. The author argues that YOIs also overlook peer-led programmes to promote children desisting from offending, through illuminating a growing body of evidence which suggests this approach can provide ‘hooks for change’ for children to desist from crime, and that it presents a model of good practice that could be used as a child first approach

Desistance habitus:strategically using experience in action

This article builds on the concept of Street and Carceral Habitus and Capital and introduces the forward-thinking concept of Desistance Capital. This takes place through an auto ethnographical embodied experience of navigating both persistent criminality and the revolving door of incarceration. The auto-ethnographical analysis is posited within Bourdieu’s conceptual frameworks of Habitus, Capital, Field, and Doxa. It is argued through lived experience that these constructs provide an innovative approach to explore how legitimacy is obtained as capital within the relational dynamic between those involved in the criminal justice system and professionals who have been exposed to similar lived experiences of crime and punishment. This method of analysis is lacking within the limited criminological investigation that has taken place on peer mentors. The conclusion is that both street and carceral experiences can generate legitimacy and credibility as Desistance Capital by professionals with both street and carceral habitus

The rehabilitation industry : lived experience and performance

We approach this essay through a unique observation of being on both sides of the criminal justice system as prisoners and drugs addicts to transitioning into professionals and educators within and around the criminal justice system. We argue that the concept of rehabilitation has – through the neo-liberal capitalist social system – evolved into a Rehabilitation Industry. The essay argues that by defining the concept of the Rehabilitation Industry, society can ask critical questions of how social media, marketing, branding, the public facing performance as well as the dubious claims of rehabilitation is taking place. The principal argument within the essay is that, although often obscured, a fusion of the contemporary digital landscape and capitalism is creating a criminal justice system that harms justice involved people, whilst simultaneously the industry of ‘rehabilitation’ generates a multitude of capitals – economic, cultural, and political – for a whole range of stakeholders – not least those of us with ‘lived experience’ now occupying the justice reform stage

Recordkeeping and the life-long memory and identity needs of care-experienced children and young people

In family settings stories, photographs and memory objects support narratives of identity and belonging. Such resources are often missing for people who were in care as children. As a result they may be unable to fill gaps in their memories or answer simple questions about their early lives. In these circumstances they turn to the records created about them by social workers and care providers to reconstruct personal histories. Research suggests that thousands of requests to view records for this purpose are made each year in England under the subject access provisions of Data Protection legislation. This article reports the findings of MIRRA, a participatory research project on the memory and identity dimensions of social care recordkeeping. Drawing on data collected during interviews and focus groups with adult care leavers, the study explores the motives and experiences of care-experienced people who access their records in England. Findings show the practical and cultural challenges they face when doing so, and the resulting impacts on wellbeing. The study suggests that the development of person-centred approaches to recordkeeping in social work, which focus on the perspectives and experiences of the individual, could better support the lifelong memory and identity needs of care-experienced people

The "double whammy" of addiction and prison:recovering without recovery

My name is Andi Brierley, and I am currently a Senior Lecturer in Criminology, Investigation and Policing at Leeds Trinity University (LTU). I have been in Higher Education for around 3 years as I write this chapter and prior to this role, I was a Senior Teacher on the Custodial Leadership MSc delivered by LTU in partnership with the Unlocked Graduates. This is a graduate scheme, and the students are required to work as front-line prison officers while studying for the MSc degree. Before starting that role in September 2021, I worked in the field of Youth Justice with children and young people receiving Youth Justice disposals from 2008. This started through working with children sentenced for the most serious offences and in the latter part of my Youth Justice journey within a strategic role safely reducing children in the care of the Local Authority encountering the Youth Justice System. This role was responding to various independent reports highlighting an overrepresentation of those who experience care within the criminal justice system and how it can impair health and social outcomes