Prisoners Post Release: The Need for a ‘Critical Desistance’

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Prison does not promote desistance. Statistics around reoffending following a custodial sentence demonstrate that the penal system is not effective in curtailing recidivism despite repeated government aims to reduce reoffending. Much desistance research has demonstrated that a cessation in offending is the outcome of a complex interaction between subjective/agency factors and social/environmental factors. However, desistance research has failed to engage with more radical arguments around prison abolition. This chapter therefore aims to examine this gap in the literature and advocates for scholarship and research into a ‘critical desistance’. Utilising the Real Utopias work of Erik Olin Wright (2006, 2010) as the basis for a more radical approach, this chapter suggests a framework for a critical desistance based on principles of social justice, emancipatory alternatives to punishment and engagement with wider social change. The reformist trajectory of most desistance research and criminal justice practice has led to the continued notion that prison could work under certain circumstances. A critical desistance approach is grounded in the abolition of prisons and punishment, rather than the reform of a system that serves to restrain desistance trajectories. This chapter argues that prison and penal punishment are a contributing cause of recidivism and, therefore hinder the process of desistance. Crucially, desistance research needs to engage with abolitionist theory, as the dismantling of the prison industrial complex would have the greatest desistance promoting potential of all.