Circles of Support and Accountability: Criminal Justice volunteers as the ‘Deliberative Public’
| Author | Paul Almond, Andrew Bates, Chris Wilson |
The last thirty years has witnessed a ‘managerial revolution’ in probationary and rehabilitative practices (McLaughlin, Muncie & Hughes, 2001). This has placed an increasing emphasis upon preventative and adaptive responses to offending risks, the integration of market-oriented dynamics into penal services, and the use of actuarial rationalities to organise the pursuit of institutional performance targets (Bottoms, 1995; Garland, 2001; McCulloch & McNeill, 2007; Simon, 2007). The pursuit of efficient risk management, and the audit of performance in relation to this goal, has become a new orthodoxy, albeit one that has given rise to a number of tensions, particularly over how it interacts with the professional skills that inform probation work (Ashworth, 2009; Burke & Collett, 2010; Canton, 2007; Newman & Nutley, 2003; Raine & Wilson, 2007). There are particular concerns that the application of the language of risk and probability, and the processes of targeting that accompany it, to the offender management context (Feeley & Simon, 1994; Loader, 1996) has the potential to reduce the participants in probation to the status of targets for intervention, thereby obscuring their agency, and to replace practitioner expertise with systematised models of offender management (Canton, 2007; Newman & Nutley, 2003; Raine & Wilson, 2007).
The issue is not necessarily that performance-monitoring is illegitimate within publicly-accountable criminal justice organisations; rather, its centrality means that those organisations can become preoccupied with bureaucratic and strategic considerations to the exclusion of the human-centred value orientation that should inform their work (Dzur & Mirchandani, 2007; Hudson, 2003; Loader, 1996; Weaver, 2009). This line of argument draws on the Habermasian notion of juridification, or the colonization of the ‘lifeworld’, in order to explain why instrumental rationality can have detrimental consequences for the criminal justice system. For Habermas, actions taken by public bodies derive their legitimacy, or claims as to rightness, from their connection to the shared moral values of the democratic public sphere (Habermas, 1987; 1988). Policies that lack this connection are unable to legitimate themselves by establishing reasons for their existence.
As public policy is placed in the hands of bureaucrats and market forces, and reduced to a series of technical questions for experts (Loader, 1996:33), it is distanced from the public sphere. At the same time, participants within probationary systems become passive, demoralised, and alienated, viewing their own progress as a matter of meeting targets rather than of self-development (Habermas, 1988; Weaver, 2009). It appears that the prevailing public sentiments expressed in many jurisdictions tend to be punitive and oriented towards the endorsement of harsh criminal justice policies (Bottoms, 1995; Garland, 2001; Roberts & Hough, 2005; Simon, 2007), and attitudes towards community-based offender management are characterised by scepticism and a lack of understanding (Allen & Hough, 2007; Maruna & King, 2008; Roberts & Hough, 2005). While there is considerable evidence to suggest that public attitudes are not always as negative as this (Green, 2006; Hough, 1996; Hutton, 2005), the dominant discourses around community-based criminal justice remain broadly negative. This leads to a perception that these programmes are illegitimate when compared to retributive or incapacitative measures, and so ‘tough on crime’ agendas endure and coexist uncomfortably alongside an increased professional recognition of the value of restorative approaches (Garland, 2001; Maruna & King, 2008; McNeill, 2009).
Sex Offender Management and the Deliberative Public
This paper recounts a study of citizen volunteers working within the field of sex offender resettlement, and their potential value as mediators of public hostility towards practices of this sort. Interrogating the reasons why members of the public get involved with sex offender management programmes, and what the implications of this involvement might be, is important because the public mistrust set out above is much more pronounced in this context than elsewhere (Brown et al., 2008; McNeill, 2009; Wilson et al., 2007). Efforts to treat and resettle sex offenders run contrary to the dominant media-led sensibilities of a society which is highly anxious about the risks these offenders pose and which distances itself from engagement with them via a profoundly exclusionary social narrative (Gavin, 2005). Ironically, by marginalising those convicted of sexual offences, this exclusionary narrative makes it much less likely that reoffending risks will be managed successfully (Brown et al., 2008; McNeill, 2009). Public policymaking has tended to reflect this dominant narrative of risk and exclusion to the detriment of the services in question.
It may be suggested that there is a need for the wider public to “own up to” practices in this area in a way they rarely do, engaging more fully in debates about sex offender policy. Deliberation of this sort “connect[s]...policy more sensitively to what the public perceives as important, and allows the deliberative consideration of multiple values underlying the practice of punishment” (Dzur & Mirchandani, 2007:160), particularly important in an area such as this where ‘public opinion’ and ‘true public attitudes’ may diverge considerably (Green, 2006). Greater engagement makes public attitudes more informed, less punitive, less open to distortion by the media, and more oriented towards restorative and rehabilitative goals (Hutton, 2005). Engagement of this sort also ensures that criminal justice practices have a secure legitimatory basis; there is a degree of community accountability which ensures that the reasons for action taken in the public interest are clear (Dzur & Mirchandani, 2007; Weaver, 2009). Resettlement and rehabilitation are validated as legitimate goals of the criminal justice system because they are grounded in public dialogue.
Volunteer involvement in the management of sex offenders within the community is a powerful example of this kind of citizen engagement. Approaches that focus on reintegration into the community emphasise the need for meaningful contact between offender and public as an element of desistance-building (Bottoms, 2008; Farrall & Calverley, 2006; McNeill & Whyte, 2007). Having direct contact with members of the community, and being involved in practices that promote integration, builds the social capital needed to facilitate resettlement. Insofar as desistance is a process of re-entry into the community, the relationships built through mentoring or supervision frameworks can provide the sort of community-based rituals necessary for reintegration (Farrall & Calverley, 2006; Maruna, 2011). Making and maintaining acquaintances, discussing experiences and thoughts with other people, and becoming more skilled at social interaction, are all elements of offender-public relationships that have significant reintegrative value. Voluntary interactions in the area of offender resettlement were thus recently recognised at governmental level as a powerful tool of personal and social change (Neuberger, 2009).
Volunteers within the criminal justice system are proxy representatives of the wider community and, because they have made a moral choice to freely give their time, occupy a particular motivational space; their input is given as a genuine social good, and is thus immune to the kind of instrumental pressures that afflict other elements of the criminal justice system. By virtue of being at least partly altruistic in nature, the contribution made by volunteers inclines towards being rational and informed, open and inclusive, and ongoing, the values defined by Habermas (1987) as the qualifying requirements of genuine communicative action. By investigating the motivations that underpin volunteer engagement in one sex offender resettlement programme which has the potential to be truly deliberative in nature (Circles of Support and Accountability, or COSA), and providing more narrative detail about who engages and why, we can thus gaining a better understanding of the wider role that volunteer involvement is capable of playing in legitimating and grounding such programmes in a more developed sense of the public interest.
Circles of Support...
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