The power of change

By Kieran McCartan, Ph.D.

People change! For better or worse, they change. Behaviour, cognition, and personality are dynamic traits in people. Circumstances, contexts, and interactions change them. Change can be rapid or slow depending on the individual.

In criminal justice, individuals can change into people who commit offences and they, can, change out of people that commit offences. Change is motivated by many reasons and is always personal. The role of the criminal justice system, in its broadest sense, is to hold people accountable for their actions and to facilitate pro-social change in behaviour, actions and personality. People who exit the criminal justice system should be changed for the better, more pro-social and safer. Research and practice have demonstrated the benefits of pro-social behaviour change programmes that promote social inclusion and shared social values at reducing risk of re-offending. Additionally, there is an emerging literature on the impact of pre-offence or early career interventions at stemming offending behaviour. Change is possible, but its complex, dynamic and individual.

Currently in Scotland, England and Wales there is a crisis in our prison system. Our prisons are overcrowded with the criminal justice system relying on punitive measures, often short term, rather than looking at alternatives to justice (i.e., community supervision, electronic tagging, accommodation in hostels, etc). This has meant that there are too many people in our prisons, and we have recently reached an impasse. If we are not going to build more prisons but still send more people to prison, we have a fundamental problem. This impasse has resulted in a review of the prison population and the release of low-risk prisoners, a release of prisoners near the end of their sentence, or a reorganisation and reallocation of the prison population to lower security estates.

This is all based on risk of reoffending and dangerousness. Although in the majority of cases decisions being made mainly on the risk people opposed to the public (for instance low risk and lower tariff people being released to the community under the supervision of police and probation, and others being moved within the secure estate to lower risk/open establishments) certain offences (i.e., domestic violence, sexual abuse and terror related cases) are often off the table in terms of reallocation or release. The message here is that regardless or risk the index offence is paramount.

This is problematic. Severity of the legal system’s response should be based on assessments of risk more than on the severity of the index offence. There has been social and political commentary on whether this is endangering the public and whether the right decisions have been made. We have to trust the trained professionals in our criminal justice system. Decisions on release are not taken lightly given the socio-political context and media optics of early release and the risk management and audit culture that we live in. This, in turn, raises another issue related to change: trust. Trust in the system to know what its doing, trust in people to manage their behaviour and not reoffend and trust in society to accept them back in; all of which are challenging. Trust does not come easily. This means that we as individuals, communities and a society must change our views on rehabilitation, the power of change, and the potential for social integration. We must understand and start to trust more in the evidence, and work towards accepting change, not matter how difficult, in people.

In the UK, as across much of the world especially westernised and global north countries, we are at a crossroads in the way that we that we think about and respond to offending behaviour. Do we accept that people can change, regardless of their risk level and index offence, and work towards their postive social inclusion based on our trust in the professions that work with them? Or do we not? If not, what do we do? Build more prisons and incarcerate them indefinitely? These are challenging and nuanced questions, but ones that we need to start addressing. If we expect change in people who have offended so that they can return to society, do we not have to change as well to enable them to do so?