Exploring the potential of ‘working-making-doing’ with people who have lived experience of the criminal justice system
| Published date | 01 June 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/26338076221142871 |
| Author | Aaron Hart |
| Date | 01 June 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Exploring the potential of
‘working-making-doing’with
people who have lived
experience of the criminal
justice system
Diana Johns, Catherine Flynn, Maggie Hall, Claire Spivakovsky and Shelley Turner,
Co-production and criminal justice, Oxon: Routledge, 2023; 160 pp. ISBN
9780367349028, £39.19 (hbk) See https://www.routledge.com/Co-production-
and-Criminal-Justice/Johns-Flynn-Hall-Spivakovsky-Turner/p/book/9780367349028
Reviewed by: Aaron Hart , VACRO, Melbourne, Australia
For those of us who are tasked with crafting specific enactments of lived experience within the
criminal justice context, there is a need for frameworks to lend shape and coherence to our prac-
tice. “Lived experience”expertise is invoked in a wide range of frameworks, discourses and
agendas. Each time we speak about lived experience in a specific way, we attach it to a hinter-
land of normative values, epistemological claims, technical practices and power relationships.
For example, lived experience has been enacted as an epistemological orientation and research
method (McIntosh & Wright, 2018); as a consumer voice within neoliberal choice frameworks
(Mol, 2008); as a form of affective, narrative advocacy (Bátiz et al., 2021); as a redistributive
practice within recognition theory (Fraser et al., 2004); as a “descriptive”representative of
others excluded or otherwise absent from political processes (Pitkin, 1967); and as a form of
expertise within a democratic governance process (Dewey, 2012). While there are many over-
laps and resonances between these enactments, there are also tensions and misalignments. If
not prudently curtailed, this proliferation of modalities may diminish the coherence and
force of specific evocations of lived experience. There is a risk of lived experience discourse
leading everywhere and nowhere.
This new text on co-production within the criminal justice sector invokes lived experience as
a specific role within processes of “working-making-doing together”.The book has three parts:
(1) introduction and theory; (2) case studies; and (3) thematic analysis and conclusions. Case
studies are presented on User voice prison councils in the UK, the Birds eye view podcast from
Darwin, the Straight talking peer mentoring programme in Geelong, a qualitative research
project with young men in the NSW youth justice system, and the Keeping on Country research
and policy development project in the Gulf of Carpentaria. These case studies are interrogated
for their affordances, sensitivities and resistances, and the net result is something akin to a
manifesto. The authors conclude that (p. 134):
Book Review
Journal of Criminology
2023, Vol. 56(2-3) 372–374
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/26338076221142871
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