No wrong directions
I started to read a timely and accessible contribution to the challenges facing prisoners returning to there communities, On the Outside, a book with an emphasis on community reintegration beyond individual recidivism.
I started to read a timely and accessible contribution to the challenges facing prisoners returning to there communities, On the Outside, a book with an emphasis on community reintegration beyond individual recidivism.
Mike Guilfoyle, a long-standing friend of the Centre for Crime and Justice, died peacefully at home on 19 November, after a long battle with cancer.
It might seem somewhat counter-intuitive in light of my twenty years as a probation officer to be promoting a book by Vincent Schiraldi the former Probation Commissioner of New York City.
Community-based supervision is relatively invisible, in the popular imagine, compared with prison.
Making a positive and enduring difference in the lives of those coming before the courts requires a commitment to the demands of procedural justice.
Every so often I read a book on criminal justice that leaves an abiding impression for its originality, compassionate tone and incisive range of critical reflections.
Antong Lucky’s memoir charting his path from incarceration to political activism, A Redemptive Path Forward, contains a memorable phrase: “withered my last ambition”.
While poring over a compellingly readable edited collection of criminal justice essays that expand on the notion of justice and challenge the drive to mass incarceration, a memory arose of a brief but troubling supervisory experience.
Waiting to Inhale, chronicling the impact of the US ‘War on Drugs’ on black, brown and Indigenous American people, offers a powerful vision for redemptive policy measures that might offer new ways of securing racial and social justice redress.
Jamie Peacock’s incisive and accessible book, Working the Phones, draws on his experience of working undercover in a call centre to uncover some of the alienating features of front-line workers undertaking low-paid and high-stress work.
One day, I was hastily enlisted to appear on a TV News channel on behalf of the probation union, Napo, as a practitioner to talk about potential cuts to offending behaviour programmes in London.
It is always gratifying to pick up an accessible criminology book offering a fresh ethnographic approach based on hard-earned biographical insights into some of the often overlooked ambiguities of desistance.