Who owns desistance? A triad of agency enabling social structures in the desistance process
| Author | Andrew Fowler,Katherine Albertson,Jake Phillips,Beth Collinson |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480620968084 |
| Published date | 01 February 2022 |
| Date | 01 February 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480620968084
Theoretical Criminology
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480620968084
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Who owns desistance?
A triad of agency enabling
social structures in the
desistance process
Katherine Albertson
Jake Phillips
Andrew Fowler
Sheffield Hallam University, UK
Beth Collinson
University of Derby, UK
Abstract
Theories of desistance assert agency is a prerequisite to the process; agency which
can be enabled or curtailed by social structures. We present data from six community
hub sites that hosted probation services in the UK in 2019. While our analysis
identifies agency enabling institutional and relational structures across the different hub
governance sub-types in our sample, these were clearest in hubs run in the community
by the community. This article contributes a triad of core enabling social structures that
operate at the intersection between agency and structure in the desistance process.
The significance of our findings is that the ownership question is key to the expedition
of enabling social structures.
Keywords
agency and desistance, agency and structure in the desistance process, agency–
desistance link, community hubs, desistance, enabling social structures, ownership of
desistance
Corresponding author:
Katherine Albertson, Department of Law and Criminology, Sheffield Hallam University, Heart of the
Campus, Collegiate Crescent, Sheffield, S10 2BQ, UK.
Email: K.Albertson@shu.ac.uk
968084TCR0010.1177/1362480620968084Theoretical CriminologyAlbertson et al.
research-article2020
Article
2022, Vol. 26(1) 153–172
Introduction
In 2006, Maruna posed the question: ‘Who owns re-integration?’ using Christie’s (1977)
‘conflicts as property’ perspective. Maruna (2006: 24) argues that, if viewed as ‘property’,
the ownership of re-integration has been ‘given over’ to the formal criminal justice sector
rather than being ‘located with its rightful owners—victims, offenders and communities’.
Based on the data analysis presented in this article, we apply the same ownership question
to the desistance process. Responding to the call to the discipline to ‘expand its collective
imagination’ (Paternoster et al., 2015: 225) our analysis illuminates how the ‘process of
desistance, and the people who support it, extend beyond penal practices and practition-
ers’ (Weaver, 2013: 193; see also Farrall, 2005; Farrall et al., 2010; McNeill et al., 2012).
Understanding the agency–desistance connection is described as the ‘missing link’ in
desistance research (Laub and Sampson, 2003: 141; see also Carlsson, 2016). This is
important as agency is considered by some as the most important predictor of successful
desistance (LeBel et al., 2008; Liem and Richardson, 2014; Maruna, 2004). We concep-
tualize agency in the desistance process as being as much an institutional and relational
structural concept as an individual phenomenon (see Burkitt, 2016; Farrall, 2005;
Weaver, 2012).
In this article we examine the link between agency and desistance in the context of
community hubs. Community hubs are spaces in which a range of agencies are co-
located to provide support services (Dominey, 2018). Community hubs operate with
different governance models. Six governance sub-types are categorized by the third party
status of the organization providing the premises and defined as: community hub; hybrid
hub; specialist hub; pop-up hub; co-location; and reporting centre (Gardner, 2016: 1).
The nature of these sub-type governance structures ranges from: an independent com-
munity hub, for example, Community Voluntary Sector (CVS)-run premises providing
space for probation appointments as a small part of a much wider existing generic local
community support offer; to a reporting centre—although technically not a hub, the main
premises are still provided by a third party, usually a police station or prison visitors’
centre (Gardner, 2016). The remaining four sub-types range by the extent to which pro-
bation-run premises are used to host external agencies or vice versa.
This article begins by defining social structures and agency and considers how these
concepts are currently conceptualized as interacting in the desistance literature. Our
inductive data analysis is presented and the resulting triad detailed. The key implications
of linking enabling social structures to the ownership question are detailed in the con-
cluding sections. This article’s contribution is threefold: extending understandings of
institutional and relational structures that are agency enabling; providing a triad of core
constituents of enabling social structures; and advocating for the addition of the owner-
ship question to the growing recommendation that desistance interventions are informal
(McNeill, 2012; McNeill et al., 2012).
Considering agency and structure in desistance
Conceptually complex and historically contested, contemporary definitions of social
structure generally acknowledge at least two distinct types of structures exist (Lopez and
154 Theoretical Criminology 26(1)
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