Service user input is key to solving social problems
Debbie Barnes
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
Howard Williamson on why offenders are essential to stopping the cycle of reoffending.
During my postgraduate research on young people and the criminal justice system, I developed a particularly close bond with one young man who, these days, would be described as a prolific and persistent offender. He had already served time in approved school, detention centre and borstal. It occurred to me that we could potentially be a winning team on a project to reduce young offending and to support young people on the wrong side of the tracks.
Our very different backgrounds and experience made us a watertight combination. He was convinced that his street credibility and my professional knowledge had some chance of turning young lives around. I applied for modest resources for a three-year experimental project, but no prospective funder saw any merit in his role in the plan. Yet without him, I had little chance at all. Eventually, I gave up and his criminality persisted – to this day.
Wind the clock forward 30 years, and a charismatic and energetic former drug user and dealer started to attract public attention with the publication of his best-selling autobiography Wasted. Mark Johnson was quickly engaged by a variety of organisations concerned with crime. And he then established User Voice, a charity that has put former offenders at the heart of a mission to prevent and reduce the prevalence of crime and violence both within and outside of the criminal justice system.
In a very short space of time, User Voice has won contracts throughout the country to work with probation and prisons on this agenda, and it claims some dramatic successes in changing the prevalence of crime, strengthening pathways out of crime and transforming individual lives.
Involving service users from the criminal justice system is, of course, contentious, but it is also courageous, premised as it is on the cleverly worded assertion (and User Voice strapline) that "only offenders can stop re-offending". The dual meaning of this phrase provides both a truism and a policy position. And given that so many other starting points have produced such deplorable outcomes, for both individuals and society, the thinking behind User Voice must be worth a try.
Indeed, much the same policy position could and should be argued around other matters of social concern and responsibility, such as school exclusion, leaving care, learning disability, homelessness or domestic violence. Gaining understanding from the perspectives, experiences and attitudes of those at the heart of the situation in question can never be the whole of the story, but it has to be a critical starting point.
Neither the idea nor the model is especially new. It has prevailed, certainly theoretically and often in practice, in youth work for many years. User Voice points to the active citizenship of ex-offenders, their role in partnership and co-production, the importance of feedback from their experiences, and their place in informing future policy development. These are established tenets of the youth participation agenda and they have been applied increasingly to shape better policy and practice, and thereby to enhance individual prospects. In the case of social groups, such as offenders, whose behaviour has formerly created social problems, enlisting their support in pursuit of the resolution of those problems would seem to be an unsurprisingly wise move.
The latest initiative of User Voice is CanDoCoffee, a social enterprise that provides former offenders with flexible employment and a stepping-stone towards the labour market. In tough times, the creative imagination of Mark and his organisation stands in stark contrast to the recalcitrant stance adopted too often by the Ministry of Justice.
My old contact might never have been attracted to selling coffee from a van, but he would have been a good partner in a youth work enterprise. Instead, he has racked up huge public costs associated with a lifetime of criminality that could probably have funded User Voice for a decade or so. We should have been listening more closely and carefully 30 years ago.
Howard Williamson is professor of European youth policy at the University of South Wales