Desistance | Shadd Maruna and Karen Johnson

Welcome to Episode 5 of Series 4 of the Forensic Psychology podcast. I'm Dr Sally Tilt. And I'm Dr Karenza Hocken. And we work for HM Prison Approbation Psychology Service and are based in the Midlands working across a number of prisons. Between us, we have over 50 years of experience working as forensic psychologists and this podcast is a chance to hear the real voice of real forensic psychologists. The Ministry of Justice is the biggest employer of forensic psychologists in the UK. You can follow us on LinkedIn by searching Forensic Psychology podcast and find out more about recruitment and careers at the Ministry of Justice at jobs.justice.gov.uk. Joining us today are Shadmaruna and Karen Johnson to talk about resistance from offending. So Karen is a registered forensic psychologist and she has worked for his Majesty's Prison Approbation Service for 17 years and she is currently the Regional Lead Psychologist in the South East and East area where she leads the Psychology Services delivered across 10 prisons and also the Regional Probation Directorate for the East of England. Karen is also part of a team involved in developing Psychology Services for those on probation. Karen is completing a PhD through Queen's University Belfast, supervised by Professor Shadmaruna and Professor Michelle Butler and this is entitled "Doing Justice to Desistence Narratives Developing the Desistence Identity Tour". Welcome Karen. Shad is the head of the Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology at the University of Liverpool and the past President of the American Society of Criminology. He's also a long-term member of the Correctional Services Accreditation and Advice Panel. Previously he's worked at the Queen's University Belfast, University of Cambridge and Rutgers University where he was the Dean of the School of Criminal Justice. He received the Howard League for Penal Reforms in Organal Research Medal in 2013 and his book "Making Good" one of my favourites was named the Outstanding Contribution to Criminology by the American Society of Criminology in 2001. Welcome Shad. Great to be here. Big fan of the podcast. So lovely to speak to you both today. So before we kick off with the detail of the questions, Karen I'm going to come to you first. Just tell us a bit about how you find yourself in this area of work. I think I've always been interested in human behaviour. I think when I was at school I just, you know, probably from watching lots of guests on the podcast from watching programmes like "Why are you in the Blood" and that type of thing. I just became really interested in psychology so I studied that at college and went on to study at university. I was really interested in offending behaviour and why kind of people like me at those choices are end up in that kind of pattern of lifestyle really and I was really lucky to get some experience in the prison that was local to me as I was growing up and I just went there and built up some really good relationships with some members of staff that worked there and they kind of took me under their wing and gave me great opportunities to just get to know a little bit more about what prison life was like and what it would be, what kind of being a friend's psychologist would involve and yeah it just became my passion as well. I always wanted to do and then I got an assistant psychologist job, trainee job and I qualified through the prison service. Yeah, quite a traditional route but I think it's just yes and I've always been really interested in. And what brought you to the decision to do a PhD around existence? So I was involved in the development of the progression regime so the very first one in the prison service so these were new initiatives that were all based on the distance literature to really try and give people an opportunity to develop their kind of lives and also think about their identity and how they see themselves and it was really informed by the decisions literature and through that process I obviously became really familiar with Shad's work, his research that Sally mentioned there in the instruction and it just really struck with me and actually a lot of the messages from that about really kind of listening to somebody's story, trying to understand what's happened to somebody in their life, how they end up where they are now and why that is important for them in their future. Really struck back to there's really early conversations I had when I very first stepped into a prison and a prison officer was talking to me about those exact same things and it just really really interested me and then so yet with some gentle encouragement from people around me saying there's an opportunity here to try and to kind of do a bit more work and I was particularly interested in how we a psychologist can just bring that literature and evidence based more into our everyday practice, so yeah that's why, yeah it was kind of general enthusiasm and passion for the area. I can see as you talk about that, how interested and enthusiastic you are about it and we're really looking forward to hearing about your research in more detail and also I'm really curious about your work around the Desistence Identity Tour and you know those practical applications so really looking forward to that Karen, thank you and Shad the same question to you. Yeah I guess my origin story really kind of started here in Liverpool, I'm from the States, I came to criminology without ever having taken a single criminology class or indeed until I had to teach a class in criminology I hadn't ever read in criminology, I was studying something called human development and social policy and I chose that largely because I didn't know what it meant but it sounded like it was big, big and I had a lot of ambitions and a lot of energy, I was low on organization or strategy but high on ambition and I really wanted to do something important but didn't know what that might look like really until I came to Liverpool on a Fulbright fellowship back in mid 1990s and discovered here in the city and the people in particular in a community of former prisoners that I was interviewing for the project I found myself, I found my place in the world and have been doing this kind of work for a long time and a number of different jobs and a number of different cities I think you might have read through some of them and in your bio I've edited that down to make it sound a little more coherent than it is but I found myself in recent years a little bit lost a little bit unsure again of what it is that I can do and should be doing and made the decision to come back here where I had found such clarity 30 years ago and I'm back in Liverpool and on round two here still doing my curious research around assistance that I'm sure we're going to talk about here later today. We are indeed, thank you so much Shad, I'm really grateful that you and Karen could find this time to talk to us today and let's make a start there with that research Shad, I would really like to start by setting the scene because I think you and Karen live and breathe this word assistance that we've already used a number of times in the episode but I'd like us to start by just defining what it is and I wonder if you can give us a little bit of a background, when did we start using the word assistance or when did you first come across it Shad? Yeah, great question, it's one of these things, I love and hate the word, the word has been good to me, the word has been synonymous with my word and so you hate to talk bad about an old old friend but it really has been a curse of a word in so many ways, it's hard to say, it's hard to spell, people don't know what it means and I think most damningly the people who are doing it who are desisting don't know the word desisting and to me there's something curious and creepy about that, there's very few examples of words that would be in that situation, it's kind of a legal term in lots of ways so we would know it from the famous cease and desist letter so deceased and desist is to stop what you're doing cease and then to stay stopped, don't do it again basically so to desist is to not do it again and in some ways there isn't a really good alternative word for that, we sometimes call it stopping but stopping is a different part, that's the cease part and stopping committing crime is easy, as soon as whatever the act is that somebody is about to commit it eventually will stop and so is that stopping crime? No, that's not what we mean when we want people to change, when we want people to what used to be called ghost straight and in going straight had a lot of virtues to it largely because going straight sounds like it's an active thing okay we can watch people as they go straight and that must be a challenging journey that's worth looking at because we have a phrase for it, now going straight has taken on very different connotations and people don't use that phrase anymore, some American phrase in films going legit but people don't say either of those things, which is quite interesting but they have the virtue of being active words, the other word that sounds like assistance but isn't assistance but many people here when they hear the word "defistance" is resistance and I've started to like that, it used to be an annoyance, people would introduce me as resistance expert, Chad Murner, you know, and these sort of things and it's always embarrassing to have to explain that this is something different but resistance and resistance besides being identical except for one letter you know are very similar in that they're both about avoiding something but resistance sounds like an active process, I mean up the resistance and all these kind of things, it's an active pushing back against something and resistance is a different action but likewise an active thing, it's not about just avoid, which, I mean officially the word is best represented as a lack of offending, an absence of offending specifically among those who have a history, a pattern, an identity of offending so it's easier to think about it in terms of parallels and metaphors, so imagine I played this saxophone and this was a key part of my life, maybe I'm a professional saxophone player, maybe it's just my hobby but I love it and I play sax phone every day and I play it every day for my mental health, I play it as my own sort of escape, I play it to work through things in my life and it's a part of what people know that who I am is a saxophone player, I might go a week here and a week there without playing the saxophone, that's not a big deal but if I went a month, six months a year and I never picked up the sax, something weird's going on there, I'm doing something, I'm resisting maybe the temptation, I'm desisting from playing the saxophone and there's maybe I'm taking up a new hobby I'm running now or I've got a new instrument that I'm playing or maybe I've just rejected music altogether that it's a waste of my time but something big has happened in my world, now you know in truth I've never played this saxophone in my life and so it wouldn't be the case that I'm desisting from playing this saxophone because I've never established my film as a saxophone player, so desistence is an absence of playing this saxophone for someone, for whom playing this saxophone was a big part of their life and that's how I sort of think about it with defending, you know it's not that everyone in prison needs to desist because some people in prison had never built up a pattern of behaving, it hadn't become part of a lifestyle or an identity, we're going to talk a lot about identity because Karen's here, it hasn't become part of their self but for many it does, it becomes a sort of habitual routine, you know some we used to say criminal careers and careers is kind of a notion, you know although there is professional criminality, it's not you know for many it's more like a hobby, it's more like the fact of own, you use it when you're under stress and stress comes many times in our lives, so it could be any of these things as long as it's a part of a pattern of the self and then it's a process of abstinence from that pattern. Oh I love that. It's so important to get that clear though Shad because it's a word that is just thrown about and without stopping to think about it, I think what you've really sort of highlighted there is desistence in itself in some ways is the dull bit, it's the bit when someone stopped and the bit that's really interesting is what is happening inside that person or with that person that causes that stopping bit to happen and I suppose that's the bit that some of your research is really nicely dug into, one of the sort of concepts that I love you're writing about is the desistence narratives and scripts that people use and I wonder if you can sort of tell us something about that because that's I guess that insight into what's causing the dull bit, it's not rude to put it that way, but not at all, yeah no, I'm a great believer in stories and narratives, or one of the key things that make humans humans and we kind of grow up listening to stories from our earliest years, be it religious stories or cultural stories, Disney, whatever it is as human beings as we grow, we're fed this endless diet of different stories and a number of philosophers, psychologists and others have argued that human beings come to understand the world through stories, we're left computers that program in a kind of rational logical way and more storied creatures who see the world as stories and try to make sense of our own lives as a story and behave in ways that agree with that story, so one of the things that I argued in making good and some of my early work was the desistence from crime required because it's such a difficult thing, it may look boring on the outside, but because it's such a big challenge, because there's so many forces that pull someone back into criminal behavior, that we're very well aware of the kind of the structural obstacles to reintegration that people face on coming out of prison, they struggle to get jobs, they struggle to form relationships, they struggle with reuniting with family and friends, these kind of challenges are enormous and need to be overcome in order to integrate into mainstream society and give up offending behaviors, and I argue in the book that all of these are made possible through developing a self-narrative and a specific type of self-narrative, one that can account for why you did the things you did, so to say, look, I'm not a terrible person, here's what I did and here's why I did it, but then also this story needs to explain why you're not going to do those things again, why you are different now or in a different circumstance, and that's a challenging story to tell because we all know sort of the best predictor of the past is the future and oh you did a terrible thing, I'm not going to trust you, that's how the brain works, we stigmatize very naturally to protect ourselves as employers or landlords or future partners, we immediately see that somebody has had a checkered past and we judge that person, so the narrative is a way of kind of moderating that overcoming that natural sort of stigmatization process and saying, well hold up, before you make that judgment, let me just tell you my story and we have unfortunately in Western societies, Eastern societies have even more narratives to draw on, public narratives that are available through those Disney films or religious stories that can make a case for how somebody has changed and the word for that, we talk about Christian culture but indeed through most religions we talk about this as redemption and redemption has lots of heavy weight to it as an idea and it's got problems and it's been problematic for me as a secular psychologist, criminologist to talk about redemption because I'm not implying any of the sort of religious elements of that when I use that word, but redemption is simply a descriptive term for that narrative art and we have a literature and an understanding of redemption stories in society and so in making good, I make the case that the assistance is facilitated through the development of a redemption story or redemption script as I call it. You know, I'm actually feeling quite chuffed to be a human because it's this beautiful whole thing that's happening inside everybody's heads as you've described that we're telling these stories to ourselves and because of our reliance on language is our form of kind of understanding and communication, we've ended up with this sort of, as you've really neatly described, it sort of need to represent things within this kind of verbal framework and you know, I acknowledge my bias as being a human that I'm glad to be a human, that's bringing me to that kind of realisation. So look, Shad, thanks for setting that up really neatly, Karen, I'm going to come to you because the other kind of concept that would be good to kind of nail down kind of early on is a strengths-based approach because this is a term that I think I've heard sort of increasing over my career, sort of less so near the beginning and sort of much stronger now and I wonder if you can kind of unpick that phrase for us a little bit and also kind of put it in context with what Shad has been talking about in terms of assistance. Yeah, of course. I guess traditionally when we think about rehabilitation and what we were kind of aiming to do in terms of prisons, a lot of that was focused on like risk factors, so forks and on those things that Shad was talking about there, about the reasons why people end up becoming involved in offending and some of those things that like draw people back and it was, I guess the experience of that for people going through, it was very negative that it was about taking something away or telling people things that they can't do anymore or that they mustn't kind of engage with and wasn't necessarily giving them kind of skills or things to in for that would be more fulfilling for their lives, so I think what we've seen develop kind of more recently has been much more focused on like strengths-based approach which is I guess kind of flipping some of that on its head and saying, "Act, let's think about what is meaningful for this person, what do we want this person to achieve in their lives, like what do they want to achieve and how can we help them achieve that?" And when you think about what Shad was saying there in terms of the assistance narratives and particularly the redemption script, really the systems involved kind of strengths-based approach would be very much about trying to help support an individual think about their abilities to assist in the future, about instilling her that sense of self-efficacy and their belief in their abilities to be able to kind of move away from crime. And actually what we've found is that where you use that strengths-based approach and you work with somebody in that way, that actually there's risk factors get dealt with through that process, so you don't necessarily have to directly target this, but by the process of increasing the strengths and the attributes that those individuals already have, that can really help them develop those narratives and help them move away from some of those risk factors, but in a much more kind of positive approach that feels more helpful for the person and less punitive. I think if I compare what you've described there, it's really neat with things that I might personally want to change, and if somebody was suggesting things that I could strive towards rather than sort of identify all my failings, there's a difference in the way that I would feel about that, I suppose. Yeah, absolutely, and I think whenever Shad and I talk about this, and I know when we write about it, we often reflect like anybody who has tried to give up something that either you know is not good for yourself or other people have told you you need to kind of give up, then it's always much easier if you approach that thinking about what am I going to do instead of, so in Shad's example, so the person decides, you know, the saxophone is no good for me anymore, I want to learn to do piano, so they're spending all the time doing that instead and that's really fulfilling for them, rather than somebody you're saying you've got to stop playing the saxophone because it's really annoying and you're keeping me awake all the time. So it's achieving the same outcome, but it's about how you do that for the individual so that they feel really part of that process and that they're, yeah, that it's a positive experience for them. I've always found it a little bit curious, and I've struggled to get my head around it. We've had almost a bit of a battle in the field between rehabilitation and assistance as if there was a right or wrong answer to that, and I wonder where we've kind of landed with that now Karen, how would you kind of describe it? I mean, I think that we're really ever going to like working together as practitioners and you know, I'm a practitioner who's doing a PhD, you feel to really strongly about crossing that boundary and working together with academics and practitioners to share knowledge and experience to create better systems and processes and policies for the good. So I think that is always going to be my kind of view, is that working in that way, and I think should generally kind of think for them as well, that's a positive way of working. It gets to the same point as what you're saying, isn't it, exactly. So it might be that you're taking the strength-based approach as you're leading as a practitioner, but it is also addressing sort of important risk factors which, you know, it don't go away, and it might be something that people do need to attend to in a different context, but it's, I guess, framing it kind of in a different way. It's something that strikes me as well. In terms of the outcomes of measures of change, we've completely understandable reasons, have long fixed on reconviction, that's kind of our target. But I wonder if that's sort of almost, I'm steered us off, you know, a strength-based or a assistance pathway in doing so. It's a really good point. And we're kind of saddled with reconviction, I think it's sort of maybe as necessary, but certainly not sufficient as a measure, and there's all the cliches about, if you don't measure it, you don't do it, the problems with reconviction is there's a huge distance between what happens in, say, a treatment setting and intervention setting and reconviction, and the dependent variable, in this case, reconviction is related to far too many factors outside of the control of the individual. You know, if anything, reconvictions in the control of the justice sector of the state and it's something, you know, we know that there's a huge dark figure of crime that lots of crimes go undetected, lots of crimes that get detected, don't get processed through the system and don't wind up as a conviction. So the person who's coming out of prison or is on probation has a much more, a much higher likelihood of reconviction for doing an act than your eye would have for doing the exact same act. So it's a very messy way to measure system interventions to have our dependent variable be a system measure, but it's, you know, it's essential. I mean, if, you know, we were trying to sell some new change to our justice policy and didn't mention or discuss the impact it would have on official recidivism statistics, it's not going to go anywhere. So it's something that we want. But also when you have a variable that's so distance, without the mediating variables there, you could say, you know, one person could say, okay, our reconviction rate, I think everybody agrees, reconviction is too high, no matter what it is, it's 50 percent with an age group or a group that's too high, 30 percent's too high. There's no kind of measure that anyone would say, that's about the right amount of reconviction. But one person could say, well, it's too high. Therefore, we need to make prisons much tougher. Another person could say the rates too high, we need to have much more rehabilitation in the system. It could go in any direction because we don't have that sort of theory in a course it has. It's been used, reconviction, to justify all sorts of different changes left, right, and center, none of which have seemed to be the magic bullet. So if we have a theory of change, the like, the assistance gives us and we say, this is how, from studying people who have assisted, from studying success stories, we seem to see these patterns and how people desist, then we know, okay, we can target stable relationships. We can target steady employment. We can target feeling like they have a place in their community and in their world as, okay, these are the kind of mediating measures that we want to look at before it gets to reconviction. And that's as Karen was saying, those strength measures, we tend to measure, did they screw up, and if they screwed up, we punish because that's what the system does. The way we think of justice is a system of an eye for an eye and punishment, but justice need not be that, where there's other forms of social justice, restorative justice looks at and trying to, okay, here's, there's a harm been committed, how can we make amends for that harm and these kind of things. So if we had measures for these kind of positive things that people achieve, then suddenly, you know, staff and everyone else might work to those positive targets in the same way they work to the negative of trying to prevent the thing that we all don't want, which is the further criminal behavior of oversight of this. I love listening to this. And because I'm a human, I can't help applying it to myself. And so I'm now picturing if my target was to stop eating chocolate, and the measure was whether a family member happened to catch me in the kitchen when I took the chocolate bar out of the cupboard rather than actually sort of the act in itself, and if we could focus more on how I'm feeling about being a chocolate eater and my intent, then that would be quite a different kind of measure, right? I'm going to apply that later. Karen, so you obviously came along and this field was kind of nicely developing and there was a gap or something that motivated you from moving from what is a busy job as a practitioner and you had plenty to do to thinking there's something here I would like to dig into and research a bit more. And what was it you really wanted to understand when you started your PhD? Yeah, and I think just listening to that conversation there, I guess, I was just reflecting that looking at that behavior and outcome, what that does is it really takes away the human element in that whole process of moving away from crime, doesn't it? It takes away what is actually happening for this person. And I guess we all come into this job and this field to think about how can we make people's lives better. And I think the more you do it, the more you realise that the line between the people who are kind of victims or who have committed crimes and ourselves is really, really narrow and thin. And I think actually by focusing more on what is happening for the person is what really motivated me. So I think I'd done lots of reading around assistance, really, obviously, with taken by Shad's work around that development of redemption scripts and how powerful they are in the assistance process. There's a whole body of kind of evidence there that talks about that and how that relates to community outcomes. They're not just about whether somebody offends or not, obviously that's the byproducts but actually what happens for them people in terms of their lives. And then at the same time, I was a practitioner doing lots of risk assessment and I was thinking, you know what, we don't ever really ask people about this stuff when we're doing sitting down with somebody in a room asking them about their lives and their future. And that just really struck me as a huge gap. And I know that there's lots of really, really good practitioners and we all are autonomous and we can bring our own evidence base and literature into the work that we do. And undoubtedly, I was doing that as best as I could thinking about the assistance literature, but that really relies on an individual practitioner understanding that area of the evidence base and bringing that into their daily practice. So that just really, really seemed like a really big gap to me. So I approached Shad with a, I don't know whether I approached or maybe hounded him over a period of that, with my research proposal, that's the thing about a PhD you need to kind of engage your supervisor. So yeah, I was talking to him about what I wanted to do. There'd already been some attempts at kind of looking at this in the region that I'm in, but I really wanted to just take that further and look whether we could actually, could we develop a tool that might help practitioners engage in those conversations with people and about their narrative in a, in a assistance focused way. And then I had the absolute privilege of Shad agreeing and so I've been working with him over the last so many years, I've had it, yeah. And to kind of develop a tool that practitioners can then use in their practice to explore this and to have informed conversations with people about, about their identity and how they feel themselves. I'm really looking forward to hearing about this tool, Karen, because as I've been listening to the conversation so far, one of the things I've really been thinking about is this is an area I think that many forensic psychologists really feel intuitively like this fits and it is something we should be paying attention to, but so much of our trainees on risk, isn't it? And as you were talking about risk reduction, I don't know, I've really tried to think about how do I incorporate this into an understanding of risk, but it's felt so clumsy. And I'm not sure I've done it very well. So I'd really like to hear your thoughts on what this could look like in the process of a risk assessment. Yeah, I think that they're really interesting reflections and definitely how I felt and I guess my kind of motivation to, to kind of come into this area was this is clearly really important in terms of the systems and whether somebody goes on to a friend or not. And therefore it's also important in terms of risk reduction and those two things shouldn't be seen as a person, those two things should be kind of working together. So yeah, my whole thesis being about trying to understand whether firstly is it possible to even develop a measure that might enable us to tap into these narratives with people who are still in custody or in the community. So I've done a series of studies, there are four individual studies which have all built upon the previous one to develop and test the measure. And I've done that in the ethos of working with the participants rather than seeing them as being kind of the research being done to them. So I've really seen this as being the kind of men in custody who have helped me think about the item polls, to test this, to talk to me about how does that sound to them? Is this something that they relate to with these items, things that they hear people talking about on their residential units? Was really, really important to me. And equally what I've done in the list of my research is talk to practitioners. So I've shared this measure like with them, I've asked them how do they currently think about incorporating assistance and identity into their assessment tools. And then I've shared the measure with them and encouraged them to think about how they see that might be working in practice. And a lot of those practitioners shared similar views as what you and I have kind of reflected their currents there that this is really important. And I know it's important, but I don't know how to fit it in or I'll try and squeeze it into this item on the HCR20 or maybe I'll try and bring it into my formulations. But am I doing that right? I'm not really too sure. And then when the kind of measure was shared with them and we talked to you that people responded really positively to that. And so actually this is something which is a conversation starter. It gives kind of the prompts to encourage a practitioner to just start that conversation with somebody to ask somebody, how do they see their lives? Like I guess we've talked a lot about the redemption scripts. What we've not talked about is the condemnation scripts that Shad identified in his work and subsequent we reset just have two and that's where people feel that have that more fatalistic mindset about their future and see themselves in this cycle of just being doomed to deviance. They feel like they've got any control over their lives that everybody else and everything else will determine that for them. And I think when you're a practitioner doing consultancy with somebody or you're working through a risk assessment of somebody and you hear this thing and I think we've not necessarily had the tools so far to allow us to think about well what that might mean in terms of assistance and why there's narrative might be present and what that might be signal in them that we might need to be doing to work with this person to help them facilitate that development of more strength and redemption scripts. I've got so much wisdom through my mind Karen that I want to talk about. Before we move on just to hop back to HCR 20 can you just explain to us what that is? Yes that's a structured professional judgment tool which psychologists in practice will use fairly frequently as about assessing risk of future violence and you do that by looking at historical factors so that's where you start through all the things that might have led to somebody to kind of offending in the past you look at a clinical fact so that's some more recent behaviour and then you think about future risk management as well. So within those kind of structured professional judgment tools we're guided aren't we to ask about certain things and those things are largely failure factors I guess you could call them things where people have struggled in their lives where things have gone wrong and it feels very negative and almost the condemnation stuff I think comes through there. Am I right in thinking Karen then that your tool orientates us to ask about the redemption side of things to think about the other narrative rather than the sort of failure narrative I don't know if that's the right word that's the phrase that comes to mind though. I like that I don't know what she had to think but yeah that kind of condemnation yeah. Maybe it looks at this there's two kind of factors in the skill so it looks at redemption also looks at condemnation I think that's really important for us because if we're getting flags about somebody identifying some of these condemnation scripts then actually we want to be building that into our kind of understanding of that person to be able to think about what we need to do to then support that person and work with them in a strengths based approach to help them develop some of more of those redemption scripts so it does look at birth of those areas. And how do we get about that and do you think you're cooperating that into our assessment of risk and our overall judgments about whether someone is at likelihood of offending again or what perhaps we need to do to work with people to support them? Yeah and I think that it could have a real good value within that formulation based process though I think where we're trying to build that picture of the individual and pull everything together I think this offers another lens to bring in to that formulation and I think importantly as well and what came up when I had those conversations with practitioners about how they see this measure was that it's not necessarily restricted to just in a risk assessment process either so I think one of the things that's come out is about how this could be used within probation context as well for example so how a probation practitioner might just have these conversations in their supervision sessions with a person as a way of really understanding like what is going on for that person right now and how are they seeing themselves in their future and what do we need to know about that person to help kind of facilitate them yeah moving to thinking about their kind of future in a different way or supporting that. I really like that it's a notion about understanding the person not just not understanding risk and it's not really as opposed until we understand the person that we would understand risk or we would understand resistance or redemption and I was listening to what you were saying about how you'd gone about this research talking with the people in prison and also practitioners and shadow I was wondering whether you could help us think about the importance of co-production in the word that we do maybe in the research and as Karen's done in developing kind of the applied tools that we want to use with these populations. I'm so excited by the work that Karen's doing and yeah I should just shout out for the podcast that you know she's building on a really important tradition both in the sociologist like Ben Cruz work and Jason War but equally in forensic psychology so Jill Atrol and Glenda Leal really pioneered this kind of work on what we sometimes think of as pains of assessment or thinking about the assessment process risk assessment from the perspective of the person going through that process. Joe Schingler did a whole PhD on that experience of being risk assessed and that sounds a passive of process and I know and Karen's earlier point about you know this rehabilitation versus resistance idea is really a fiction. I mean there is it is a co-productive activity rehabilitation or resistance it becomes a kind of nomenclature game and we think of rehabilitation as we being those of us who don't do the work that you all do but the person on the outside thinks about when they hear words like corrections and reform and rehabilitation or treatment they think of clockwork orange and these kind of you know the the state the state's going to get inside the brains of the bad people and they're going to rewire them and rehabilitate them on the other side here's your new person on the other side now of course no one working in the system sees rehabilitation like that at all we're not correcting people are reforming people or changing people in that way despite occasional and academics share a lot of the blame for for that sense that the participant is just this passive object and oh did they get the treatment what kind of dosage did you give them okay you know are they fixed now you know the person has to change and so so the person going through that process can be very defensive about oh I'm I don't need corrected I don't need rehabilitated I've changed on my own and that's where we got this kind of resistance on our own versus oh you were just corrected by some program sort of thing but in truth neither is real both or fictions the person who desist on their own oh you can't see the scare quotes I just did on the radio but the person who who says they desist it on their own did so with others they did so with with community they did so with with with family they did so with practitioners state and and and non-state and they they did so with a wider society they only were able to develop these narratives in dialogue with others so so when we say rehabilitation this is what we mean you know people like Karen people like yourself helping someone work through and think through their narrative and redevelop it not that you're dictating people's self narratives here's your story repeat this and then there are prisons around the world that do this news a fabulous study of Chinese prisons where the prisoner comes in they write their account of what they've done and why they did it it gets edited no no no yeah it's not because of this it's not this we want you to say it like this they have to rewrite it and then then resubmit their new drive it's you know that's not the process we have an HMPPS it's much more of a dialogical process of people working together and I guess the point of the strength-based focus is that you know when we use the language of risk it's a difficult one to build a redemption script out of it so so you know I have heard people say you know I'm really proud of myself I've lowered my risk I've done this and and it's like what a strange use of the English language you've lowered your risk what does that mean but it means something because this is the language we've given them in terms of our sort of fiction world the truth is what they mean by that is they've completed a number of courses they've found that they have more abilities than they thought they had they they have started to become more comfortable with working with with others and the system and they're making these these achievements and and the the strength-based approach allows them to use those kind of ordinary language and and talking about what they're proud of rather than saying that that I I'm now less risky than than than I was as if as if that was somehow in in our our gift to to to determine and and so forth so so I've gotten a question. No no no there's so much there and as you were talking about co-production strategy it pinged off an idea in my mind where where you were talking about you know we're working together and things don't happen in isolation they're all in the context of the you know the environment and the humans that we come into contact with and so part of me wondered whether you know co-production is also responsible for keeping people in condemnation and that we might have a role in doing that it may be unintentionally. Yeah absolutely absolutely yeah so so we're always co-producing these outcomes one one hundred percent as you say I don't think it's intentional always there's the the you know the classic kind of you know when someone's being released from prison see in a couple weeks I know you'll be back sort of you know the worst kind of of condemnation co-production but that for the most part isn't the case for for most actors in the justice system but unconsciously yes just you know the deficit focus of so much of our conversations and language that we use is I'm going to end this faxophone metaphor at some point but but I think Sally was saying something earlier about you know in our own lives if we wanted something you know if we wanted to learn the saxophone we would go to a class where you know beginners saxophone class and you would try to get better at it you wouldn't go to a class thought poor people with a deficit on saxophone you know and and each week that's you with your poor saxophone skills again look at your you really don't know how to do this do you and constantly being reinforced that I have to take this class because I'm really bad at playing the saxophone you know it's just a nomenclature thing but it's switching around that language and approach from one of reform and correction to one of the famously good lives and what is it that you want to achieve what are the obstacles to achieving that and how can we help you get to that point where where you don't need to to use a pending to achieve this or I think if I had to go to a saxophone class like that wouldn't last all the session yeah I think like bringing all that into context of a prison environment I think it's probably worth just also showing out all the way that roof mandated on rehabilitative cultures because I think that is another bit that really got me involved and passionate about this area of water can I think when you apply that you know that really taught us that actually it's about this everyday interaction that really influenced what happens and how somebody feels about themselves and I think that's really important to keep in mind I think when we think about the influence that we can have on somebody's journey and the ability to either keep in that kind of doomed to deviance like fatalistic minds that are moving to feeling more hurtful and yeah in control of their life of their life choices and we we talk quite a lot about rehabilitative culture in the episode we did around Ruth I think that was last series you joined us for that as well she had to direct people back to that if they want to find out more about that because that really speaks to the whole context and the environment that surrounds somebody doesn't it in I suppose creating those those scripts so Karen as the applied practitioner here I wonder whether you could give us some pointers about how do we apply all this wonderful knowledge when we when we see the people that working with face-to-face if someone's listening to this today what can they do tomorrow well do you know what I think it's really just listening to that person giving them space to talk about their experiences I think you know especially if I think about myself as a new tyranny like you're going into some of those very first risk assessments and you've got in your mind like all the things you need to ask to tick those boxes of the risk factors that you've covered in their SPJ tools and I think actually it's some of the church English work that Shad mentioned there is really about just using that kind of interview as the intervention as an opportunity to really listen to the person to give them space and also as an opportunity like we would just say in there to reinforce some of the stories of redemption and we know like Shad was saying that the kind of biggest factor for lots of people in in the development of those redemption scripts and seeing those redemption scripts through is having them reinforced at knowledge and agreed with by people around them so I think if you're hearing those things it's about really reinforcing that and yet and pointing out the positives that you're seeing there so I think listening really listening to your people's stories taking your time with that I think asking them about about these things well I think it's really is really key and carrot can I just jump in there what what should we do if we're talking with somebody where we don't see those redemption scripts where somebody's very heavily pulled down into condemnation and you know maybe shame is significant for them and they just can't see away forwards yeah I think and you know I think it's still like listening to that experience for that person and not trying to kind of mask that or ever you know or kind of talk of that I think it's allowing them the spirit that's their kind of reality that's how they're feeling that how they're experiencing life at the moment and I think it just goes back to those conversations that we're just having there about thinking about all these little opportunities that we have to kind of help people move away from those thoughts and experiences and scripts in our daily context and contacts with them and I think as psychologists we're in really privileged positions often in prisons where we can offer lots of consultancy and advice so lots of other practitioners and so whether that's prison officers or probation officers and I think it's like Shad was saying they're making people aware of what happens when we kind of label people are we use those that might feel quite as flippant kind of terminology with people but actually what impact that can have on that person and I think that's a really privileged yeah for someone to help kind of just allow people to understand that impact that we can have and so thinking about that on the individual level Karen I wonder in Shad if we could come to you just to think about what this looks like on a broader scale so Karen's given us some nice pointers about individuals but are there any organisations or systems we can look towards to learn from where they're really using resistance-based approach as well yeah I'm really hopeful here and it may be that that language, resistance informed or resistance paradigm practice model whatever the choice that the language may die and maybe good riddance to it you know if it does but I really do think we're seeing the ideas certainly strength-based ideas have grown enormously and you know I think the biggest impact we're seeing from resistance and it's not all down to to resistance research or theory by by any means but fundamentally if you wonder what does resistance informed practice look like it would mean I like to say that resistance research is about learning from success stories and resistance practice in an intervention is likewise learning from success stories drawing from not here's a model that we think is how people change but rather we've studied how people change and this is how other people have done it and this can be a guide way a pathway for you perhaps to change in these ways and it's not that it's a narrow one-size-fits-all but it says like any of us if we want to stop eating chocolate or if we want to learn the saxophone we look to role models so well here's an example of somebody who was able to do that how did they do it and I'm going to try what they tried because they they were clearly successful with that so what we're seeing a great deal of NR justice system and many others is the introduction of lived experience and bringing people with those resistance narratives with successful redemption scripts into practice in important ways both as practitioners as leaders in the system as as advisors and and that's kind of the most direct way you know it cut out the researcher middleman the Shadmorna's of Burgess McNeil's and Stephen Ferrell's and go straight from the people who who have lived it to practice now of course that's a two-way dialogue the people who would lived experience need the experience that comes from practitioners lived experience as well and they will be the first to say I learned an enormous amount from being on the other side of these desks and and you realize things that you had no idea of as a client once you become a practitioner and so so it needs to be a dialogue but we're seeing that kind of movement of put and that's really among many things that that are exciting about the fifth infant formed changes we're seeing that's probably the most direct that I've seen and I think you know really great example of that is probably Owen James isn't it who we we spoke to in series two and his book redeemable perhaps we could make that compulsory reading for hope for everybody because it's such a good insight isn't it to his his journey and all that you're describing really yeah Karen I'm just gonna come over to you for the last word I'm wondering whether you could tell us a bit about when we might be able to see your tour in a million dollar question this is feeling a little bit like a mini vibe I'm in the final phase of like bringing my thesis together so here for submission July August time so yeah it's so then then yet we can start sharing it around and and that's really exciting for me for sure great thank you Karen look thank you both I'm aware of the time and we probably need to sort of start closing not least because Shad you've got a lot of saxophone practice to do and I've got a little chocolate to eat but there's a couple of questions that we like to ask our guests and one is about the future so if you could sort of fast forward ten years how would you hope the world might look a little bit different in the in the way we work in relation to assistance practice Karen I'm going to come to you with that given that you're priming us for what's about to appear from your thesis do you know what I think I would like it to be a lot more socially kind of understood in terms of like offending and rehabilitation so I think I'd like it to be a lot more kind of social constructs been involved in supporting the kind of assistance process and moving people away from offending and you know we've got a justice system and where people jerry is a responsible for sending people to prison but I think very few people in society really understand what prison is like and what impact that can have so I think having yeah being able to kind of share that a lot more broadly like what we do you know you guys doing with this podcast and with other kind of strategies like that I think it's really key to getting a much better kind of public understanding of offending and what actually works in rehabilitation well with the magic wand of this podcast let's hope that that is the future that we kind of move towards and then the other thing that we will definitely have wetted listeners appetites and I'm sure people will be eager to sort of read and hear more about this field so if there was some reading that you would recommend or point people towards what would that be a shad I'm going to start with you and please do say your book as well as well I booked with a long time ago it was a long time ago it was and yeah maybe one of the motivations coming back here is to write another one it's been way too long since I've written a book did write another one with Tony Ward 2010 maybe but it's it's been a long time and needs to happen you know I wasn't going to plug me I was going to mention Ruth Mann I've already been mentioned which is great my mentor I always have to mention Hans talk and so many of his writings from from you know five decades ago were anticipating so many of the the issues that I grab with every day so for younger generations of forensic psychologists who probably haven't gotten been exposed to Hans's work I know Ruth did by me and really fell hard for for him and his perspective and thanked me a lot for introducing her there so I always push on there's a brand new book out this week and it's sitting on my desk so I thought I would plug this it's a new book called a psychopathy on math ED the rise and fall of a dangerous diagnosis and and it's not a book about the systems but but it is a book you know in many ways the rise of psychopathy and that approach to doing the work we do is in many ways the kind of the opposite of the strength based approach it's you know it's it's very focused on a sort of detecting an underlying negative risk characteristic and focused on a sort of stable traits that can't be changed and so forth and this book really undermines a lot of that foundation of research and it suggests that much of our interest in and identifying psychopathy and and forensic psychology was was misguided you know it won't convince everyone but it's definitely worth to read in dialogue with some of the strength base and consistent focused readings who's that by shat sorry yes I missed that part Rasmus Rosenberg Larson a Canadian which is appropriate for those of us who who know where where all the psychopathy research came from a Canadian obviously via Scandinavia but but Rasmus Larson is the author of that thanks Shad we will put the link to that as well in the show notes for this episode and we'll pin you down a little bit on some specific articles that we can recommend for listeners from some of the other authors as well that so Karen is there anything that you'd like to add to what Shad's recommended in terms of reading well obviously because Shad's the humble I'll I'll plug his book and so that'll be in there obviously there's also Lillia Kazman who's done she's got a book and positive growth and redemption in prison which I think is a brilliant brilliant book and talks a lot the hairs is based on a French prison population but it really talks about the development of those redemption scripts and girls through kind of what they look like for her and participants is really really useful book and there's a recent article by Jik Phillips and colleagues which looks at her in probation practice which just applies a lot of what we've been talking about today but into a real practice sense with probation in the community a really really interesting read and we haven't teed you up for that but it's wonderful because Jik is going to join us on this series of the podcast as well so we'll look forward to asking Jik a little bit more about that article as well and so thank you both so much Karen and Shad for giving up your time today and for just really illuminating this sort of topic and the language around it I'm sort of musing on some of the things you said and I'm going to take those things away to have a little bit of a longer think and thank you for listening to the Forensic Psychology podcast if you've enjoyed this episode you can subscribe to the series via your preferred podcast provider and even better please consider writing a review or sharing the podcast with others a review really does help people to find the podcast so it's not just about cheering Karen's or an eye up it's about helping other people to find the podcast in hearing from the people that we speak to and you can find the links for all the references in this episode on our link tree just check out the show notes meanwhile don't forget you can follow us on LinkedIn by searching Forensic Psychology podcast and find out more about recruitment and careers at the Ministry of Justice at jobs.justice.gov.uk so for me Karen Zahokin and from me Sally Tilt see you next time