Cultures of Desistance

Rehabilitation, Reintegration and Ethnic Minorities

Adam Calverley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136254574
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

In contrast to the widespread focus on ethnicity in relation to engagement in offending, the question of whether or not processes associated with desistance – that is the cessation and curtailment of offending behaviour – vary by ethnicity has received less attention. This is despite known ethnic differences in factors identified as affecting disengagement from offending, such as employment, place of residence, religious affiliation and family structure, providing good reasons for believing differences would exist. This book seeks to address this oversight. Using data obtained from in-depth qualitative interviews it investigates the processes associated with desistance from crime among offenders drawn from some of the principal minority ethnic groups in the United Kingdom.

Cultures of Desistance explores how structural (families, friends, peer groups, employment, social capital) and cultural (religion, values, recognition) ethnic differences affected the environment in which their desistance took place. For Indians and Bangladeshis, desistance was characterised as a collective experience involving their families actively intervening in their lives. In contrast, Black and dual heritage offenders' desistance was a much more individualistic endeavour. The book suggests a need for a research agenda and justice policy that are sensitive to desisters' structural location, and for a wider culture which promotes and supports desisters' efforts.

1 Introduction

Levi Roots came to the attention of the wider British public in February 2007 following his successful and memorable sales pitch to prospective multimillionaire investors on the BBC reality television programme Dragon’s Den. There, he used his guitar to sing about the benefits and sales potential of his Jamaican ‘Reggae Reggae Sauce’ and convinced two ‘dragons’, Peter Jones and Richard Farleigh, to invest £50,000 each for a 20 per cent stake in his business. Since then, the sauce has been distributed on supermarket shelves across the UK and is now worth ‘an estimated £6 million’ (Curtis, 2008). In comparison to Levi’s story, for whom, at the age of 49, widespread financial success came late in life and rapidly, the achievements of Rois Ali – dubbed ‘Coventry’s Curry King’ (Harris, 2002) – have been a more modest and slower development, but as a ‘self-made millionaire’ (Clarke, 2006) they are still noteworthy. Having run the ‘highly-rated Rupali restaurant’ with his brother, his skills as a chef were acknowledged when he won ‘the first “Hot Stuff Chef of the Year” contest in 1995’ (Harris, 2008) and his business came to national and international attention. Since then he has won other accolades such as ‘International Chef of the Year 1999 to 2001’ and made television appearances with celebrity chefs Paul Rankin and Toby Tobin¹ (ibid.). What, apart from their respective culinary success, do these two individuals share in common? The answer is that they both have previous criminal pasts from which they have recovered and both have their own stories of how they moved on and rebuilt their lives.

Born Keith Graham, Levi Roots was raised in Jamaica by his grandmother (to whom he attributes his love of cooking, see Zanardo, 2008) until the age of twelve, when he moved to Brixton, South London, where he was reunited with his parents. At the age of fifteen he was sent to prison for six months for assaulting a police officer (Wiseman, 2008). He has ascribed this as a consequence of the racist police practices prevalent in the 1970s such as the use of the Sus laws (where the police were permitted to stop, search and arrest those they believed were acting suspiciously) and the general targeting of Black youths: ‘You didn’t have to do much but just be a black face in South London to get arrested and searched. It happened to me a lot’ (Nixon, 2008). As part of his early professional career he entered the music business, touring the country as part of a group and later as a solo musician. Whilst doing this he set up a local youth club in Brixton where local youths could learn about music. It was as leader of this organisation that he was found guilty of being in possession of ‘£250,000 worth of heroin’ (Penrose and Kaila, 2007) and at the age of 28 was sentenced for a second time to prison in 1986. According to The Sun (Nixon, 2008) and The Evening Standard (Curtis, 2008), he has reportedly denied responsibility for these offences and claims he was innocent both times he was incarcerated. However, the latter says he ‘admits to a rackety past’ (ibid.) and he has alluded elsewhere, in The Times, to other involvement in offending saying ‘I was a bad boy back in the day’ (Addison, 2008).

This last prison sentence marked a key turning point in Levi’s life. He committed to a new identity, became a Rastafarian and pledged to stay away from prison in the future: ‘Lying on my prison bed I did my thinking. I left behind Keith Graham, and I became Levi Roots. I decided to do good’ (Wiseman, 2008). Central to this process was his own determination to change, but it was also dependent on the help of others. The recognition he received from an outsider in authority – a ‘liaison officer’² called Theresa (Nixon, 2008) – was instrumental in providing him with the confidence, means and vision to change his life. Levi says, ‘She saved me … and taught me how to live my life through drama and art’ (Addison, 2008). ‘She just came in and said, “I’m gonna prepare you for greatness.” She told me what books to read and how to speak. She just sorted me out. She transformed me’ (Nixon, 2008). After his release from prison in 1990 Levi successfully avoided any further offences and used his individual initiative and motivation to embark on a series of entrepreneurial ventures such as opening a clothes shop, selling mortgages and finance, opening a music store (Zanardo, 2008), re-entering the music business and going on to record his own MOBO³ nominated album. He reports that he is ‘not ashamed of [his time in prison] because the bad times shaped me to where and who I am now’ (Addison, 2008). Far from wanting to hide his past he hoped to use it as a resource to help others and told the BBC that ‘I want kids to see me as an example of how you can turn your life around’ (BBC Caribbean.com⁴). He has given motivational talks to local Brixton school children (Curtis, 2008) and to prisoners in Wales, where he recognises his former self: ‘Everything about me is what I learned while I was like these kids. Now I want to give something back. I want to inspire them’ (Norman, 2007).

According to the Coventry Evening Telegraph (Harris, 2002), Rois Ali was born in Bangladesh and arrived in the UK in 1971 aged four. He grew up in Hillfields, a suburb north of Coventry city centre. He describes himself as ‘quite a wild lad as a teenager. I was quite angry and stubborn’ (ibid.). In the same year as Levi Roots’ last sentence, 1986, he was sentenced to custody at the age of nineteen for arson. He admitted setting fire to his brother’s restaurant and causing £16,000 worth of damage. Like Levi, he credited the success of his transformation away from further offending to the recognition and help he received from another person, in his case his mother. This support, he argued, had to be seen in the context of obligations and responsibilities he had to his family and them to him:

The main thing with Asian families is that you have to respect your elders. My mum was the key role for me because she saw that if I disappeared and went my own way then I would have been involved in other things as well. She was very ill at that point and I had great respect for her. I thought whatever she said I can learn from, she must be right. She told me to do my own food and I said OK and announced my ambition to open a restaurant with my brother as a chef (ibid.).

For Rois his mother was a key actor and the respect that he had for her was a key factor in his transformation. She not only policed his behaviour, but he was also motivated to care for her. Furthermore, he accredits her with providing him with the ambition and self-belief to be a chef. Arguably, achieving this change would not have been possible if he had not previously gained work experience ‘working in restaurants across the country’ and securing a position at his brother’s after he had done so (ibid.). His brother provided the contacts and the means (the social capital, if you will) through which he was able to achieve this new identity. One can safely assume that a precondition to this success was his brother’s forgiveness for his previous actions. Reflecting on his past Rois said in 2002, ‘like any youngsters, you do silly things or get out of control and family guidance is very important. I’m more of a family man now and my life is going up and up and the community respects me so much’ (ibid.). In addition to his work with charities, Rois’ standing as a member of ‘the community’ is evident in his position as a spokesperson for ‘The Coventry Bangladesh Islamic Society’ (British Muslims Monthly Survey, 1996).

Stopping offending: is ethnicity important?

How are we to make sense of these two accounts about becoming involved in and moving away from crime? Are they just random stories for whom the processes and factors responsible for their stopping offending should just be read as unique to them as individuals? Or, are they to be understood in relation to the stories of others who have made the same personal journey of transition? If so, this begs a further question: what accounts for the similarities and differences in their experiences of stopping offending? One attempt to address these questions may be to identify what characteristics both cases share. In one extremely obvious sense they are both atypical: it is highly unusual for reformed criminals (like most people) to go on to become millionaires, self-made or otherwise. However, in another sense the journeys that they have both made are typical of the overwhelming majority of people who have been convicted of a criminal offence. Contrary to the popular ‘common sense’ belief that criminals remain committed to crime and rarely change, it is a truth (albeit one not universally acknowledged) that the majority of offenders, including the worst and most serious, will eventually stop.⁵ Identifying these shared characteristics does not, though, tell us any more about what mechanisms are responsible for promoting and enabling them to change their lives. If we compare the factors Levi and Rois describe as helping them change we can identify similarities: for example, they both have individual ambitions to change and say that another person played a role in helping them. Likewise we can identify differences: the nature of the relationship between them and the person who helps them varies. For Rois this was a close-kin relation, his mother, while for Levi an ‘outsider’ in a position of authority who he met in prison provided this role.

Yet, even this compare and contrast approach still leaves unanswered important questions of cause, effect and issues of representation. How do we account for the differences in how they stopped offending? How representative are they of others who share similar biographies, experiences and socio-economic characteristics? Are their experiences indicative of a wider array of social processes and factors that they share in common with others? This prompts us to look for an appropriate lens through which to view such shared experiences. In doing so, ethnicity emerges as a potentially significant variable. In particular, is there something about someone’s ethnic background and its location within a wider social structure that places limits upon or provides opportunities to stop offending? Ultimately, if we are to appreciate what is responsible for driving individuals’ stories of change – whether it is just individual differences or if it is related to a wider collection of structural factors – we must address the following research question:

What are the factors and processes associated with desistance from crime among some of the UK’s principal minority ethnic groups?

Any serious attempt to investigate this subject needs to take as its starting point the principal processes that are already known to be associated with desistance from crime and consider how these may vary by ethnicity. For example, are employment and relationships with one’s family significant factors in promoting desistance for minority ethnic offenders? If so, how does access to employment and the type of work that they are likely to pursue vary by ethnic background? What role do their families play in supporting their efforts to desist? Do they provide different pressures to stop (or continue) offending and offer differing levels of resources to draw upon? What types of impediments do offenders from different ethnic groups face in terms of their successful desistance and what strategies are adopted to overcome these? What places and spaces do offenders drawn from the same ethnic group occupy now they are trying to desist? How do they see themselves in terms of their past, present and future and what emotions do they report and are these shared along ethnic lines? Are the ‘turning points’ and motivations to desist the same for all offenders regardless of their ethnic background?

However, it is important when considering differences between minority ethnic groups in how they move away from crime to sound a few notes of caution. First, we must not only premise ethnicity in our appreciation of the social and structural setting where their desistance takes place. We must remember that all these ethnic groups live in the same society. They live in the same historical moment. They live in the same country. They are subject to the same macro-level developments and forces, the same economic, political, legislative and ideological changes. These are shared common experiences. We are not comparing groups from completely different times or places. Second, ethnicity must not be seen as an essential entity responsible in itself for producing differences. Instead, ethnicity is arguably best understood as an interactive factor with other determinants of desistance, as a significant co-variant.

Nevertheless, we know there are differences between ethnic groups over a range of indices such as employment, health, family formation, histories of migration and settlement, place of residence, home ownership and engagement in different social institutions such as religion and marriage. Differences in two key areas, in particular, have implications for shaping the nature and direction of desistance: social structures and location. We know that ethnic minorities have different networks of family and family structures, and different levels and access to employment networks (Mason, 2003). Variations in these structures between ethnic groups produce differences in terms of access to social capital. This has implications for desistance with those with higher legitimate social capital having more opportunities to escape from crime (Hagan, 1997). Any examination of the role of ethnicity in the desistance process must take these differences seriously because we know that these factors take primacy over the impact of any formal intervention in the desistance process (see Farrall, 2002). In addition, it is well documented that different ethnic groups are residentially concentrated in specific locations. This provides some credence to referring to such places as actual ‘communities’ and treating them as worthy of separate analysis. However, these tend to be areas of deprivation. This means that ethnic minority offenders living in such areas are subjected to a socio-spatial concentration of accumulated disadvantage. This has implications for the possibilities of them leaving crime behind. Therefore, the impact of ‘community’ on desistance is, again, worthy of serious examination. In sum, we know there are significant differences between ethnic groups at the meso-level. What is needed is a research study that will explore how differences between ethnic groups impacts on how they stop offending.

We need a study that will focus on the perspectives of minority ethnic desisters themselves who have been previously involved in crime and are in the process of ‘going straight’. It needs to be an appreciative enquiry that collects and analyses their personal accounts of desistance. This will enable us to investigate the reasons behind their decision making and allow us to explore their own narratives of change and strategies for stopping. It will also provide an insight into the social context where their desistance, as well as their previous offending, takes place and will identify the factors and processes that were meaningful to them as desisters. In order to ascertain whether experiences of desistance vary by ethnicity we must employ a comparative approach and recruit a sample of respondents from across some of the UK’s principal minority ethnic groups.

These issues have been addressed in the work that is presented in this book. The study’s sample comprises desisters from two South Asian ethnic groups – Indians and Bangladeshis – and desisters of African, African-Caribbean and mixed African/European origin, who have been grouped together under the category ‘Black and dual heritage’. Desisters were all recruited from the London probation area and had all previously committed offences. It is important to capture desisters’ responses in depth and detail and explore issues in further detail where necessary. One-to-one semi-structured interviews provided the best means of achieving this. Therefore, the study is quite deliberately qualitative in its approach and research methods it uses. The interviews that provide the basis for this study – both the interviews with the desisters themselves and the interviews conducted with professionals who have had experience of working with minority ethnic offenders – are still capable of delivering insight into how and why offenders belonging to different ethnic backgrounds desist from crime.

Book overview

This chapter has described the context of the research, and the main issues and research questions which will be addressed by the book. Chapter 3 describes the study’s methodology. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 each comprise a separate analysis of the main findings related to desistance for each of three ethnic groups included in this study. Prior to this, each chapter commences with a pen portrait of the respective ethnic groups that outlines the key demographic, geographical, historical and socio-economic characteristics of these groups in the UK. Chapter 4 describes the processes associated with desistance for the Indian offenders in my sample. It notes the important and imposing role that family plays in their lives and discusses how the dynamics of family relationships determines their efforts to desist. The importance of family is also given detailed attention in Chapter 5 in the discussions of desistance amongst Bangladeshi offenders, alongside the role of other social networks such as friends and (re)engagement with religion. This is followed in Chapter 6 by an analysis of the experiences of the Black and dual heritage offenders that also considers the adverse circumstances in which their desistance takes place and what strategies are employed in response.

Chapter 7 draws the findings of the previous three chapters together and compares and contrasts how the processes associated with desistance for each of the respective ethnic groups play out at various different societal and structural levels.

Chapter 8 draws conclusions for the study, identifies future areas for research and suggests public policy recommendations based on the recommendations of the research.

However, in order to contextualise this research I will now present, in Chapter 2, a review of the literature as it relates to what is already...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Ethnicity and crime, ethnicity and desistance - Reviewing the literature
• 3 Methodology
• 4 Indians and their desistance from crime
• 5 Bangladeshis and desistance from crime
• 6 Experiences of desistance among Black and dual heritage offenders
• 7 Thinking through ethnic differences in experiences of desistance
• 8 Conclusion
• Appendix A Research outline: ethnicity and desistance from crime
• Appendix B Research instrument minority ethnic desistance study
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index