Assembling recidivism: the promise and contingencies of post-release life.

• Author: Halsey, Mark

Interviewer: What was the first thing you did when you were released from secure care [last time]?

Participant: The first day I got out I done crime.... Done another motor vehicle high speed chase.

Interviewer: You did? And ... can you put your finger on how come that happened? Participant: I didn't have ... much of support, like. (A, 60:41). (1)

Participant: [Of the last two and a bit years] I've spent 132 days out in the community and 650 days incarcerated. (B, 18:20, aged 17).

1. INTRODUCTION

   This Article details the prospective and retrospective narratives of young men aged fifteen to twenty years who have lived through successive cycles of custodial sentences and release--and who have often done so in relation to juvenile and adult correctional facilities. (2) Specifically, it engages a grounded, "client"-oriented approach to the problem not simply of juvenile repeat incarceration, but of the incredibly high rates of progression from juvenile to adult custodial spheres. (3) Very little research has sought to follow a group of young men through their respective pathways from juvenile detention to adult imprisonment. The current Article can therefore be viewed as an attempt to bring the lived experiences of incarceration and release to the fore--a means for making apparent the various hopes and challenges associated with what is broadly accepted to be a critically important time during "the life course." (4) Importantly though, my immediate objectives have less to do with documenting patterns of behavior or overarching trends in "criminal careers" than with presenting and examining the meanings attributed by young men to various events and circumstances that arise during the course of such "careers." The Article is divided into three parts. First, a brief overview of the research project generating the data referred to throughout this piece is given. Second, and more substantially, the experiences of eighteen young men interviewed on two or more occasions over the last four years are brought to the fore. My aim here is to draw out the kinds of issues that tend to remain obscured when discussing the "pains of release" in more general or abstract terms. How could one know, for instance, that setting an alarm clock--having the money to buy an alarm clock--would feature prominently in the context of post-release for some young men? And how could one know, except by talking to those who have attempted the transition from custodial time to street time on numerous occasions, the extent to which feelings of shame or ineptitude work against asking for (emotional or financial) assistance when the young men can see no way out of their predicament except through committing further offenses (and risking further periods of confinement)? In the final part of the Article, I suggest an alternative way of thinking about who or "what" gets released from custody and explore some of the implications this might have for smoothing the transition from, in the words of McAllister et al., (5) custody to community.

   Broadly, then, my aim is to challenge the notion that young men released from custodial settings automatically pose a risk to themselves or to society more generally. Instead, I want to wrest the propensity for things to fall apart or go wrong away from individuals (an overtly political and under-interrogated term), and place it firmly within the risky systems of post-release administration to which young men are subjected. Without doubt, there are "youthful" activities which carry the substantial risk of arrest, court appearance, and further custodial time. But, and more to the point, there are also programs and procedures which, far from working to foster desistance from offending, literally assemble the conditions for recidivism and repeat incarceration.

   These conditions, as I will show, are very often nascent within release plans and attach themselves to the resident or inmate about to cross the perimeter of the custodial complex into the community. This, therefore, is the main story I want to tell here--the story of how young men return to custody not solely because of their behavior, but because of their responses to systems and procedures which, in an alarmingly high number of instances, steer people (back) into crime oriented pathways rather than clear of them.

2. SUMMARY OF RESEARCH PROJECT

   The Understanding Recidivism and Repeat Incarceration of Young Male Offenders: A Biographical and Longitudinal Approach project commenced in September 2003 and will conclude in December 2008. The study has been designed to record the experiences and perception of young men aged fifteen to twenty-four who are subject to repeat cycles of incarceration, and, more pointedly, to the pains of confinement associated with doing time in juvenile and adult custodial spheres. To date, forty-seven unique participants have been interviewed for this research. Of this number, twenty-five young men have been interviewed on two or more occasions in keeping with their cycles of release and reincarceration.

   Collectively, these twenty-five people have endured 20,646 custodial days, equivalent to fifty-six years of confinement (with this figure excluding time served in adult custodial environments, see Table 1). The themes emerging from conversations with this latter group of young men (aged fifteen to twenty) form the basis of the present Article. (6) Above all else--and in keeping with a constructivist approach (7) to the problem of repeat imprisonment--I sought to allow people to talk with me using their conceptual building blocks and (sub)cultural lexicons and for me to avoid--at all costs--the problems which attend drawing too narrow a frame around what researchers think people in custody should be saying or complaining about as against what these same people would like to say given an "open-ended" opportunity to talk. As previously mentioned, forty-seven young men have, as of May 2007, been interviewed for this research: twenty-two on one occasion; seventeen on two occasions; five on three occasions; and three young men on four occasions. The sentences served by these young people have ranged in length from two months to just over five years and have been levied for offenses including possession of an illegal substance with intent to supply, home invasion, illegal use of a motor vehicle, endangering life, armed robbery, serious assault, and grievous bodily harm. (8) Each of the young men interviewed had served at least one detention order prior to turning fifteen years of age. More strikingly--especially given the overriding formal commitment to rehabilitation within the juvenile system--since the commencement of the study in September 2003, twenty-five of the thirty-eight unique participants interviewed who are eligible by age (eighteen years) to be admitted to prison have progressed to the adult custodial environment--that is, have been released from juvenile detention, committed further offenses, been arrested, been either remanded to the adult system or convicted, and sentenced to a term of imprisonment.

   With this brief overview in mind, I move now to the main part of the Article--the recounting of participants' sense of what they expected to occur once released as against their accounts of what actually happened. I will then move to deal with the implications of these scenarios.

3. RHETORIC AND REALITY OF RELEASE

   It is, quite clearly, impossible to detail all the nuances of each participant's situation pertaining to release and return to custody. Accordingly, and at the risk of doing some violence to the original integrity of these stories, I have chosen to group participants' experiences into several themes which emerged from close and repeated readings of each of the transcripts. Of the eighteen substantive stories analyzed for this Article, eleven straddle the juvenile and adult custodial spheres. Although many common issues were raised by each participant, there is one theme I wish to mention at the outset of this Article, as it sets the tone for the narratives as a whole. This theme concerns the overriding optimism displayed by each young person about to embark on release--an optimism that emerged in spite of having been returned to custody many times previously. Indeed, only two of the eighteen participants expressed the view that there was a better than even chance they would again be incarcerated. Of those who had not yet entered the adult system, all were firmly of the belief they would work their way out of offending prior to turning eighteen. In short, no one believed they were going to the "big house."

   Participant: I'll be able to change my shit around.... Yeah, even [given] how much I've been in trouble, I've just thought, "Nah, I won't be one to go there [i.e., to prison]." ... I've just thought, I don't know, I just--I've always kind of thought, I'll just click out of it. (D, 44:36).

   Interviewer: Can I ask you, what makes you so sure [you won't one day go to prison]?

   Participant: 'Cause I'm gonna do the right thing now. I've said, "This is enough, enough." I'm not--I've had enough, you know, being locked up. It's just wasting my life. (E, 34:1). (9)

   As a researcher--and even with the advent of hindsight--it is incredibly difficult to know what weight to attach to these predictions. (10) Moreover, I have often thought it somewhat problematic to be asking someone to comment on what may or may not occur at some future point in time (especially somebody who has been forcibly removed for extended periods from the routines and happenings of so-called conventional life). Nonetheless, my sense is that these young men want desperately to believe they will "make good" (11)-that it is this belief, this sense of hope (however marred by the weight of past experience) that predominantly sustains the sense of future for each participant. The sense of hope--whether connected to being reunited with a guardian recovering from...