Hope for reintegration an

interview with Dr Shadd Maruna

SHADD Maruna is a Reader in Criminology
at Queens University Belfast and an
internationally acclaimed writer on the
subjects of reintegration and reducing
re-offending.
Corrections News caught up with him
while he was in Wellington for Prison
Fellowships conference When the
Prisoner Comes Home on 11-13 May.

When should the process of

reintegration start? When a person
arrives in prison? Just before they
leave?

Its something of a clich these days

that reintegration is supposed to start
the moment someone enters prison, but
prisons by their very nature are difficult
places to start reintegration!
Prison does a very bad job of being like
the real world, but it should be made as
much like the real world as possible. For
example, more democratic regimes are
better. For adult prisoners, very structured
regimes that take away all discretion
are very infantilising and not good for
reintegration.
I think if youre going to incarcerate,
every eye should be on the release date
from the very beginning these people
are going to be out eventually.

What kinds of reintegration

practices work best at stopping
re-offending?

At the moment the golden rule of

recidivism, whether in smaller countries
such as Iceland or Malta, or in larger
countries such as the US, seems to be
that 50 75 percent of people will always
re-offend no matter what you do. But
reintegration is in an exploratory phase.
We havent got any studies that point
where we could say for certain that this
works. We just have practices that show
the best likelihood of working and some
evidence.
But I have some gut feelings. For
example, wrap-around communitybased programmes seem to have the
best likelihood of working. These offer
circles of support which are often mutual
for example, ex-prisoners supporting

8 CORRECTIONS NEWS MAY 2007

ex-prisoners. They enlist others to help

and offer an atmosphere of dignity and
opportunities to change self-narratives,
similar to alcoholics going to AA.
A good example is Mimi Silberts Delancey
Street Project in San Franciso where exprisoners are helping ex-prisoners. They
run a hotel and a restaurant and people
who go there know theyll be expected to
work really hard, but its a place for them
to prove themselves. There are a lot of
other similar projects that are less famous,
but theres not much evaluation research
on any of them as theyre voluntary.
People might say that the people who
go to these sorts of projects were going
to go straight and do well anyway, but I
dont buy that. Its a process of conversion.
People start with the desire to go straight
but its a long-haul process and they need
support to keep it up.

You sometimes talk about how

the first person that people have
to convince they are a worthy and
decent non-criminal individual is
their self, but what about those
people in society who dont want
prisoners to feel that who want
them to always feel ashamed, guilty
and bad?

I think many people in society generally

feel more comfortable believing that
criminals are horrible aliens, not people,
because to believe otherwise is to believe
that, in the same circumstances, any of us
could have done it. Its a cognitive process
where we decide they are not like me.
But theres a lot of chance in the universe
and you and I are probably capable of
doing these things.
Im interested in unpacking whether
we can live without that them and us
idea. There are people who get on fine
without believing prisoners are other
or alien. This othering is particularly
bad in certain places, such as the U.S. Its
interesting to note that peoples fear of
crime often comes after politicians raise
the issue.
My hunch is its an immature view to
believe prisoners are other or alien and

society as a whole, and certainly prisoners,

would be better off if we could all take a
more mature view.
Its also interesting that the more welleducated people are, the less punitive they
are. Weve found this in survey after survey
and even after you adjust for all sorts of
variables, education alwaysholds up. Some
studies find that women are less punitive
than men, but in our study, we didnt
find that.

Since community attitudes are

important to successful reintegration
what can we do to change those
attitudes?

Stalin said that one death is a tragedy

but a million deaths are a statistic. We
often use statistics to try to convince the
public about crime and justice issues, but
theyre more moved by stories.
One terrible crime can change public
opinion. You need ex-con made good
stories to counter these with then
people see theyd written this person off
but theyre not so bad.

What do you think helps people

not to re-offend?

We did a study of prisoners with at least

three prior convictions and found that
when we measured levels of hope, this
was predicative of their success, or lack of
it, on the outside. To many academics and
practitioners, prisoners mindsets dont
matter so much as what happens to them,
such as being given a job etc, but hope
does matter. If I could grant prisoners
anything it would be some belief in a
better future.
Nietzsche said he who has a strong
enough why can bear almost any how.
The why might be faith, a relationship,
its often a child. Some people whove
been in prison have said to me they didnt
mind so much when their kids were very
small, but when their kids grew older and
were being teased because their parent
was in prison that mattered to them.
They didnt want their son or daughter to
have to go through that.

Any thoughts about how we can

offer people in prison hope?

Its hard to think on the spot what Id do

to give people hope, but maybe we could
make a list of things that take away hope
such as isolate people, give them
no opportunities and then we could do
the opposite!

What do you think of restorative

justice?

Its the most important new paradigm in

crime and justice in the last 25 50 years.
Im not giving it a ringing endorsement,
but Im very interested in it. Ours is a
business that needs transforming.
In Northern Ireland were trying to
reclaim from New Zealand the title of
Restorative Justice Capital of the World.
For example, in Northern Ireland,
for youths under 18 its automatic for
most cases to go through what we call
youth conferencing services, and many
community-based projects for adults
have emerged out of the peace process.
The evaluation numbers are good both
for victim satisfaction and reducing
recidivism.

What are your thoughts about prerelease planning?

When people enter prison we have a lot

of what we call degradation ceremonies,
where things are taken away and the
person changes from a citizen to a
prisoner. I think, pre-release, we should
be reversing this process.
We should make it deliberate, ritualistic
and slow. So often the transition from
prisoner back to citizen is dramatic and
fast. The prisoner maybe doesnt even
know quite when it will happen. Its
almost like therell be a knock on the cell
door and its heres your suit and 60 and
theres the bus.
Things like self-care units, going out on
day release to work make sense, so long as
theyre tied to good behaviour.
The prisoner has earned their citizenship
again. We need some sort of you did it
you got through congratulations!. If
we want reintegration to be as powerful as
incarceration, we need that philosophy.

Dr Shadd Maruna If I could grant prisoners anything it would be some belief in a better future.

Shadd Maruna Biography

SHADD Maruna is a Reader in Criminology at Queens University in Belfast.

Previously he has been a lecturer at the University of Cambridges Institute of
Criminology and before that he was an assistant professor for three years at
the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Albany, State University of
New York. He holds a PhD in Human Development and Social Policy from
Northwestern University (Chicago USA) and his publications largely reflect
this cross-disciplinary training. In particular, his primary interests involve
theories of desistance from crime, public opinion regarding law breakers, and
the implications of both on ex-offender reintegration. His first book, Making
Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Rebuild Their Lives (American Psychological
Association Books) was named Outstanding Contribution to Criminology by
the American Society of Criminology (ASC) in 2001. He is the co-editor of two
new books with Willan Publishing on the subject of ex-prisoner coping and
reintegration (After Crime and Punishment, 2004; The Effects of Imprisonment,
2005), and has recently co-authored the book Rehabilitation (Routledge,
2007) with Tony Ward of Victoria University of Wellington. Shadd Maruna
has been a Fulbright Scholar and an HF Guggenheim Fellow. He has also been
named the Distinguished New Scholar by the ASCs Division of Corrections
and Sentencing.

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