Criminology and Criminal Justice

http://crj.sagepub.com/ 'I am the person now I was always meant to be': Identity reconstruction and narrative reframing in therapeutic community prisons
Alisa Stevens Criminology and Criminal Justice published online 9 January 2012 DOI: 10.1177/1748895811432958 The online version of this article can be found at: http://crj.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/01/03/1748895811432958 A more recent version of this article was published on - Nov 16, 2012

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Article

I am the person now I was always meant to be: Identity reconstruction and narrative reframing in therapeutic community prisons
Alisa Stevens

Criminology & Criminal Justice 0(0) 121 The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permission: sagepub. co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1748895811432958 crj.sagepub.com

University of Kent, UK

Abstract
Drawing upon semi-ethnographic research, this article explores desistance in process among serious offenders residing in democratic therapeutic communities. It is argued that offender rehabilitation in therapeutic communities involves a process of purposive and agentic reconstruction of identity and narrative reframing, so that a new and better person emerges whose attitudes and behaviours cohere with long-term desistance from crime. This is possible because the prison-based therapeutic community, with its commitment to a radically different culture and mode of rehabilitation, socially enables, produces and reinforces the emergence of someone different. The article therefore develops existing understandings of change in forensic therapeutic communities, and reaffirms theories of desistance which emphasize the importance of pro-social changes to the offenders personal identity and self-narrative.

Keywords
desistance, identity, prisons, rehabilitation, self-narrative, therapeutic community

Introduction
In his examination of identity in late modernity, Giddens (1991: 54, emphasis in original) declared: A persons identity is not to be found in behaviour, nor important though this is in the reactions of others, but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going. This statement reflects the reconceptualization of identity away from essentialist notions

Corresponding author: Alisa Stevens, University of Kent, Gillingham Building 210, Chatham Martitime, ME4 4AG, UK Email: a.stevens@kent.ac.uk

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of a categorical or trait-based core self, which remains largely fixed throughout life, to a reiterative activity and developmental process, and a narrated, situated accomplishment of the symbolic project of the self. Identity is inherently fluid and fragile, actively and selectively constructed and repeatedly reconstructed, dramaturgically performed and achieved, in response to both ones maturing and mutable cognitions, desires, expectations, choices and conduct, and ones relationships, of similarity and of difference, with others and the social structure (Elliott, 2001; Giddens, 1991; Goffman, 1959; Hall, 2000; Jenkins, 2004). As Giddens suggests, however, identity also requires a sustained, sequential, integrated and purposive self-narrative: the stories we live by (McAdams, 1993) and (metaphorically and literally) tell ourselves and others about who we are. Theorists interested in the narrative study of lives (Josselson and Lieblich, 1993) and creation of a storied self (McAdams, 1996) accordingly argue that, as ones life unfolds, one creates and internalizes a self-narrative or life story which provides unity, purpose and meaning, and conjoins, in a personally (and probably socially) acceptable and plausible way, the disparate elements of ones life and the past to the present. To enable this narrative to keep going, one may have to refine certain aspects of it in the light of new plot developments, or rhetorically emphasize, interpret and revise key autobiographical events, in order to craft a consistent and temporally coherent storyline (emplotment) and so justify why it was necessary (not causally, but morally, socially, psychologically) that the life had gone a particular way (Bruner, 1990: 121, emphasis in original). Thus, the whips and scorns of time, mistakes, lessons learned from those mistakes, turning points, pleasures, triumphs and serendipitous incidents all life stories contain must be, consciously or unconsciously, incorporated, edited, evaluated and refashioned to reflect the desired overarching life story and adequately express the (it is to be hoped) wisdom, self-awareness, resilience and emotional maturity such significant life events will have conferred (inter alia, Bourdieu, 2000; Bruner, 1987, 1990; McAdams, 1985, 1993, 2006; Polkinghorne, 1988; Ricoeur, 1984, 1992). For criminologists, the exploration of these narrative identities assists in unearthing the explanatory variables offenders themselves propose for the antecedents to and continuation of their offending (Bennett, 1981; Presser, 2009). More specifically, understanding tales of desistance that is, the giving up of crime helps unravel the puzzle of why some people are able to make good, while others seem eternally doomed to deviance (Maruna, 2001; Vaughan, 2007). Although desistance theory is a relatively recent addition to the terrain of criminological inquiry, an already impressive accumulation of empirical research suggests that people who abandon criminal activity make identifiable changes to their personal identity and self-narrative, and produce a new, improved self which no longer cognitively or emotionally coheres with offending (inter alia, Burnett, 1992, 2004; Farrall, 2002; Farrall and Calverley, 2006; Gadd and Farrall, 2004; Giordano et al., 2002; Laub and Sampson, 2003; Leibrich, 1993; Maruna, 2001; Sampson and Laub, 1993; Shover, 1985, 1996; Veysey et al., 2009). This article, then, contributes to the desistance literature by drawing upon qualitative research conducted in three English prison-based therapeutic communities (TCs) (Stevens, forthcoming). It is argued that offender rehabilitation in the TC involves a process of purposive and agentic reconstruction of identity and narrative reframing, so that a new and better person emerges for whom long-term desistance from crime is a

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viable and personally desirable achievement. This emphasis upon the TCs facilitation of the production and reinforcement of a more adaptive, desistance-friendly narrative identity introduces a supplementary and complementary explanation of how therapeutic communities can work to promote change, in which, unusually, the first-hand accounts of TC prisoners are privileged. The article begins with a necessarily brief outline of the characteristics and work of prison-based TCs, and the research methods employed. The institutional and individual processes by which a reconfigured self becomes possible are then analysed, and the potential this holds for long-term desistance considered.

Prison-Based Democratic Therapeutic Communities

The origins of democratic1 therapeutic communities are generally credited to the innovative attempts of a handful of psychoanalytically-oriented psychiatrists during the Second World War to treat, in a more humane, egalitarian and constructive way, traumatized veterans (Manning, 1976; Whiteley, 2004). The central premise is that troubled people need to come to understand and re-experience, in real time and within the real-life laboratory of a supportive social community, the ways of thinking and behaving which have damaged them and perhaps, expedited their infliction of damage upon others. Their difficulties with, for example, relating to others and regulating their feelings can then be played out through the daily living-learning experiences (Jones, 1968: 106) and opportunities for self-discovery and social learning the community provides, and explored in depth through group therapy. This requires an ideological commitment to specific values and practices, none of which one would automatically associate with a penal environment. The former include egalitarianism and informality, empathetic tolerance, constructive scrutiny and collaborative working, and democratized engagement in and shared responsibility for the effective functioning of the community (Haigh, 1999; Rapoport, 1960). The latter relate to the use of talking therapy to unearth, understand and work through the (often unconscious) motives, unresolved conflicts and learned maladaptive self-protective behaviours that can result from traumatic formative experiences (Cordess and Williams, 1996; Malan, 1979), and the wider promotion of a reflective culture of enquiry (Main, 1996 [1946]). In prisons, this TC method is enacted through thrice-weekly slow, open psychotherapy groups of up to eight offenders or, in the language of TCs, residents and one or more trained facilitator, who may be a psychotherapist, psychologist or prison officer. It is in these groups, the relative permanence of which encourages trust and secure attachment (Bowlby, 1969), where residents gradually dissect their entire life history, and with the assistance of group members, attempt to discern connections between their problematic past experiences and ongoing dysfunctional behaviours. These groups are complemented by bi-weekly community meetings, in which all residents one of whom chairs the meeting and available staff discuss and debate any issues which will promote the effective functioning of the community. Additionally, residents participate in both unique TC pursuits a series of unpaid rep[resentative] jobs, psychodrama, art therapy and social events to which members of the public with a professional interest in TC prisons are invited and other institutional forms of purposeful activity employment, education and training, gym, visits intended to promote their self-development.

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The TC has been accredited as an offending behaviour programme for use in the Anglo-Welsh penal system since 2004, alongside the cognitive-behavioural (riskneed-responsivity) programmes which otherwise now monopolize correctional rehabilitation on both sides of the Atlantic.2 A dedicated TC prison, Grendon, has, however, been in existence since 1962, while four other English prisons Blundeston, Dovegate, Gartree and Send currently offer a single therapeutic community unit within, but physically, and to varying degrees, operationally, distinct from, the host establishment. Thus while Grendon is wholly self-contained and remains the only British prison to operate according to TC principles across all six wings, residents in the units leave the TC regularly to participate in work or recreational activities alongside mainstream prisoners. Most TC residents are serving substantial sentences for serious offences against the person. Notably, Gartree TC known to its members as GTC recruits exclusively from the life-sentenced population of its host prison; while Grendon has gained an international reputation for its expertise in working constructively with men clinically diagnosed as personality disordered and/or psychopathic, and who may have been perceived as disruptive and dangerous elsewhere in the system (Shine and Newton, 2000). Send offers the only TC facility for British women prisoners. Between them, these five establishments currently offer places for up to 498 men and 40 women, all of whom must voluntarily apply for and be assessed as suitable for TC treatment.

The Research
This article draws upon qualitative material gathered as part of a semi-ethnographic,3 exploratory study of prison-based democratic therapeutic communities. Its purpose, in contrast to the evaluative studies or practitioner-oriented writings which have tended to dominate this field (inter alia, Cullen et al., 1997; Genders and Player, 1995; Marshall, 1997; Morris, 2004; Newton, 1998; Parker, 2007; Shine, 2000; Shuker and Newton, 2008; Shuker and Sullivan, 2010; Taylor, 2000), was to appreciate (Matza, 1969) the TC experience from the perspectives of serving residents, whose testimonies, as in prisons sociology more generally, otherwise tend to be excluded.4 The result was a sociological and phenomenological account of the TC way of offender rehabilitation (Stevens, forthcoming) the authors abbreviated expression for interviewees multiple contrasts between the way we do things here and system imprisonment which augments previous understandings of what helps (Ward and Maruna, 2007: 12) people to change in this environment. The research was conducted in three stages during 2006 and 2007 at the TCs at HMPs Grendon, Send and Gartree, and combined prolonged observation of and reserved participation (Bottoms, cited in Liebling, 1999: 160) in the regime (including community meetings and, whenever possible, evening association, though excluding therapy groups) with in-depth semi-structured interviewing. In total, 43 residents at Grendon, 10 from Send and seven from GTC, and 20 disciplinary, managerial and clinical staff, all but five of whom worked at Grendon, volunteered to be interviewed. Of the combined resident sample, 55 per cent were serving an indeterminate sentence, 58 per cent had been sentenced primarily for violence, 17 per cent for robbery and 15 per cent for sexual offences. At the time of interview, residents length of stay varied from four months to five years,

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but averaged 20 months at GTC, 17 months at Grendon and 12 months at Send. The cohort therefore was one of self-selection people who wanted to discuss their TC experience and who, as it unintentionally transpired, were often well advanced in their treatment.5 In effect, then, therapeutic persisters who had had time to progress towards and to become aware of change were overrepresented in this non-random sample; a limitation of the research which may well be reflected in interviewees almost universally glowing evaluations of the regime and their rehabilitative experiences within it. All interviews were conducted in private, recorded with permission and lasted on average around two hours, though this ranged from slightly under one hour to over six hours, conducted over four sessions. Illustrative verbatim quotes appear in this article, with the interviewees pseudonymous name, and TC location. Both the copious fieldwork notes and interview transcripts were thematically coded and analysed in accordance with the principles of liberal grounded theory. Key themes and findings thus surfaced and were developed inductively from the data, but the ease of recognition and development of these themes was enhanced by the researchers prior theoretical sensitivity to the desistance literature (Strauss and Corbin, 1998).

Desistance, Identity and Self-Narratives

Theories of why people give up crime have traditionally been divided into ontogenetic (or individual) and sociogenic (or structural) explanations (Maruna, 2001). The former focuses upon the maturational reform of the offender by which he or she, almost always, eventually grows up and out of crime (Glueck and Glueck, 1940). The latter highlights the importance of acquiring in adulthood a stake in conformity: a valuable social bond and legitimate routine activities, which prompt a re-evaluation of ones past actions, present priorities and likely legacy. When these attachments are sufficiently strong and meaningful, potential desisters are deterred from offending by having something to lose: someone who (a spouse or child, for example) or something (such as employment) which they now value more than the seductions and sneaky thrills (Katz, 1988) of crime. Such offenders may therefore desist by default: not necessarily through a conscious decision to change but by becoming informally socially controlled by the responsibilities and rewards associated with going straight (inter alia, Farrall, 2002; Graham and Bowling, 1995; Healy, 2010; Laub and Sampson, 2003; Sampson and Laub, 1993; Warr, 2002). Of late, desistance scholars have additionally focused upon the subjective, purposive changes to personal identity which may precede or coincide with the important personal developments and investments identified in ontogenetic and sociogenic theories, and importantly, the interplay between the two (Farrall and Bowling, 1999).6 This integrated, interactionist perspective accordingly proposes that desistance resides somewhere in the interfaces between developing personal maturity, changing social bonds and the individual subjective narrative constructions which offenders build around these key events and changes (McNeill, 2006: 47, emphasis added; see also Bottoms et al., 2004; Farrall et al., 2011). Research which has elicited offenders accounts of their experiences of desistance highlights how they were able to create, develop and internalize a self-narrative which explicated and reinforced the nature of

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the changes undertaken by the individual, explained why offending no longer fitted into their life story, and thus allowed for a new me to materialize. Two examples from this literature must suffice. In the seminal Making Good, Shadd Maruna (2001) compared and contrasted the life stories of 65 convicted offenders. The 30 people who were desisting from crime had established a coherent and forgiving narrative, which made sense of their offending past and presented a believable prototypical reform story. These desisters portrayed their former offending self as a false identity, either by knifing off their criminal past by denying that it was ever the real me, or by positively reinterpreting the sorrows and indignities of their past into redemption and generative scripts. Conversely, those who lived by a condemnation script felt themselves to be perpetually (and prematurely) defeated by their personal failings and the structural barriers to resettlement. Peggy Giordano and colleagues (2002) drew from 180 life history narratives of offenders to theorize desistance as occurring through a succession of agentic cognitive shifts. The potential desisters cognitive openness to change had to be matched by an opportunity or hook for change (or in Sampson and Laubs (1993) language, turning point). This hook may have been obviously significant at the time, or identified as significant retrospectively because of the emotionally charged symbolism subsequently projected on to it (Carlsson, 2012; Ebaugh, 1988). (Such creative cognitive rationalization or revisionist gloss is, of course, a common feature of all self-narratives.) The point is that this hook represents a shorthand description of what made and more importantly, continued to make the process of change possible, because by recognizing (at some point), connecting with and capitalizing upon the hook, the desister could craft a rewarding replacement self. This consciously fashioned better version of oneself accordingly provided a conduit through which all decisions could be filtered, and all actions assessed, for their consistency with the pursuit of desistance, until eventually, the old (anti-social, offending) self no longer seemed viable or relevant to the new (pro-social) identity the desister now preferred. It is the catalysts for change that the prison-based TC can trigger, and the new identities this can provoke, with which this article is henceforth concerned.

The Acquisition of New Identities and Self-Narratives in the TC

The creation of a new identity in the TC begins with the early realization that the therapeutic community prison would be not like a normal prison, well, not like any other prison at all! (Stewart, Grendon). In contrast to the entry rituals of degradation and mortification (Goffman, 1961) they had encountered elsewhere, reception into the TC was warmly praised by interviewees as a friendly, relaxed and reassuring experience, which therefore immediately signalled to new arrivals they would be treated, not like a con, but a human being (Winston, Grendon). In addition to the obviously unique aspects of rehabilitation, the TC way, entrants to Grendon found that it functions without either a segregation or a vulnerable prisoners unit, both of which are otherwise considered essential for good order or discipline in secure prisons in England and Wales. Conversely,

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Grendon and GTC continue to benefit from dining rooms on each community, when these were removed from most mens prisons during the 1980s, so that most prisoners now eat within the confines of their cell (or, as many interviewees described it, the very degrading practice of eating in a toilet). Each of these differences therefore underlined prisoners emerging sense that they had entered a different penal environment: a relatively normalizing, decent and sociable milieu, with an atypical culture and approach to prisoner safety, control and interaction.

The symbolic importance of terminology

It felt strange at first, being called by my first name and calling [officers] by theirs. In the system, you could find yourself on a charge for that! Ive done many a sentence and never had it before. How would officers normally address you? Surname. They refuse to call you Mr. Whys that? Theyd say, Who the hell do you think you are? They think if they say Mr, it means youre as good as they are you know, a human being! When obviously, were just cons! [laughs] (Wesley, Grendon) Perhaps the most immediate marker of difference in the TC, however, is to be found in the terms and modes of address used. As labelling theory attests, what one calls people, matters, and may have very real consequences for the ways in which people internalize that label and act in accordance with it (Becker, 1963; Lemert, 1951; Merton, 1957). One associates very different characteristics, qualities and skills, for example, with the lecturer and the teacher, or the student and the pupil. Similarly, one struggles to connect any positive associations to the offender, delinquent or prisoner; even the ex-offender is one who is understood only in relation to his past criminality and thus always defined by it. Little is therefore to be gained but potentially a great deal to be lost by constantly referring to the user of probation services as an offender, or the person in prison as a prisoner; let alone one who further labours under the reductionist branding of psychopathic or dangerous and severely personality disordered. Prison-based TCs seem to have instinctively understood this point. Their commitment to create difference in people by being different in their institutional practices is reflected in the tradition of referring to prisoners in TCs as residents and to prison wings as communities. Resident is a morally neutral term but one which, in comparison with the coercive and custodial connotations of prisoner, is redolent with agency. Just as people choose to reside in a particular location, so people in TCs are reminded through this terminology that they have chosen to apply to the TC and continue to choose to stay. When they no longer wish to be a TC resident, they may transfer back to another establishment and become a prisoner again. Community is a word warmly suggestive of common purpose and belonging. TC residents are members of an autonomous community and are expected to work collaboratively for the good of the community, through which their position as

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one individual who must contribute constructively to their micro society if it is to function successfully, is effectively underlined. Conversely, one has no such expectations of the disparate group of people assigned to a prison wing; or rather, merely the anticipation that the resulting society of captives (Sykes, 1958) will, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, adapt and adhere to the criminalistic ideology (Clemmer, 1958: 300) of the inmate code, and assimilate, negotiate or resist, in gendered ways, the prisoner identity (inter alia, Bosworth, 1999; Carrabine, 2004; Corcoran, 2006; Crewe, 2009; Goffman, 1961). Furthermore, new TC residents are addressed, from arrival, by their first name and invited to address all members of staff from officers and psychologists to the governing (number one) governor by theirs. To appreciate what an unusual, if often initially unsettling, practice this is, one only has to consider the almighty fuss that periodically accompanies managerial attempts to encourage officers to address people in prison by their title or other preferred name; a practice championed by successive Director Generals of the Prison Service in England and Wales and more recently enshrined within guidance upon communicating with prisoners with learning difficulties.7 The controversy it still provokes, however, was apparent when a serving prisoner, Colin Gunn, alerted readers of the prisoners newspaper Inside Time to his victorious complaint to the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman about his and their right to require staff to address them formally.8 In TCs, however, the mutually agreed and uniform use of first names was perceived as putting people on a level (Peter, Grendon), and further distinguished the TC resident they now were from the system prisoner they had been, in which its like youve lost your identity because of your offence; thats all you are. But using your first name gives you that bit of respect back (Danny, Grendon). The reclamation of individuality implied by the use of first names therefore symbolically reasserted to TC residents their primary identity as a unique human being, and not merely one unit of the stigmatized collective of just cons.

New roles and changing self-perceptions

These early indicators of institutional difference are developed through the different and greatly enlarged conceptualizations of offender rehabilitation available to TC residents. The diversity and detail of the TCs enabling culture is explored elsewhere (Stevens, forthcoming). For the purposes of this article, three elements adequately illustrate the ability of the TC to engender self-perceptions of emerging or achieved change: the successful performance of rep jobs, democratized participation in community meetings and the reappraisal of the past and its relevance to the present through engagement in group therapy. Rep jobs require residents to assume responsibility for a task or function which is of benefit both practically to the community and developmentally to the individual, since residents were voted into rep positions on the basis of who would get the most out of it, therapeutically; itll bring up issues for them (Peter, Grendon). Rep jobs for more senior (therapeutically well advanced) residents could require superior communication, interpersonal and organizational skills: contributing to the prisons drug strategy and

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violence reduction meetings, for example, or planning and orchestrating social events for external invitees and visiting family members. Community meetings an essential feature of the organization of a therapeutic community (Jones, 1968: 87) provide a deliberative and decision-making forum, in which residents are required to debate and vote upon, by show of hands, everything that affects our community, because it is our community (Belinda, Send). These may range from the relatively mundane proposed expenditure of the communitys social fund, for example, or agreement upon invited visitors to the surprisingly substantial the communitys constitution, the suitability of potential new residents or the viability of the continuing membership of those residents who had violated the communitys rules. What rep jobs and community meetings share is that they were perceived by interviewees as self-esteem enhancing and dependency-reducing. TCs, with their psychiatric origins in rebuilding men traumatized by war, understand that one way to make a damaged person less damaging to others is to improve self-esteem: people who feel good about themselves do not generally feel compelled to make other people feel bad. As any popular psychology book asserts, the abusive lover or bullying boss mask their own insecurities and inadequacies by displacing them onto convenient scapegoats. More authoritatively, self-determination theory (Deci and Ryan, 1985, 2000; Ryan and Deci, 2000) (a macro theory of human motivation and personality) postulates that human beings are predisposed to seek autonomy, relatedness and competence a propensity to have an effect on the environment as well as to attain valued outcomes within it (Deci and Ryan, 2000: 231) and that these fundamental needs (or innate psychological nutriments) are essential for ongoing psychological health and development, motivation and the achievement of effectiveness, connectedness and coherence. When these needs are thwarted, individuals will inevitably suffer psychological distress and, Deci and Ryan contend, develop dysfunctional compensatory strategies and substitute fulfilments, as seen most acutely in the emergence of psychopathy. Supportive social contexts or environments, however, which satisfy these three core needs, can provide an important emotional corrective and act as a powerful influence upon the maintenance or enhancement of the motivation necessary to contemplate and realize change. This accordingly explains why giving something back to the community through competently executed rep jobs and having a say in community meetings, with the mutually beneficial consequences (valued outcomes) this entailed, was so conducive to identity reconstruction and the development of better possible selves (Oyserman and Markus, 1990):
[Being Family Day rep] allows you to better yourself and prove yourself to the lads and to know that youve done something worthwhile for the community and its been massively appreciated. I never really thought of myself as an organized person before or a generous person but I am, thats what people have told me, because of the way I did that job. Yeah, I put a lot of energy into that, I got real satisfaction out of it, and I felt proud of myself which aint normal for me! (Alan, Grendon) I never had a high opinion of myself at all. I just generally hated myself and never thought I would amount to anything But its started to change for me, from actually achieving things I always hated speaking up before and now I go into meetings with governors and

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what have you and say my piece, and the lads look to me to get things done. Thats a big responsibility and, you know what, Im bloody good at it! [laughs] (Callum, Grendon) I never really believed I could be anything better; its very hard to think highly of yourself when youre a drug addict and committing crimes, you know? [My rep job] showed me that Ive got a good head on my shoulders and it can be put to good use; I am capable of more; I can be someone totally different, basically thats what this place gives you Having that say [in community meetings] although obviously there are limits it doesnt make us feel as if we are convicts. It makes us feel as if were humans, adults ... What we say actually counts for something. Its our community and we have a big say in the running of it. (Nate, Grendon)

Two other themes can be gleaned from the above quotes. To assume a role successfully is to commit to the normative behaviours and attitudes associated with those roles (Ebaugh, 1988). In successfully enacting their role in the community as an organizer, a committee member, a responsible and autonomous individual upon whom others rely the resident began to perceive that he or she was responsible, autonomous and reliable. This subjective sense of accomplishment was objectively confirmed by the communitys affirmation (thats what people have told me). Since ones identity consists of both ones private self-image and ones social identity, perceived, bestowed and sustained by others, the latter influences the former, ensuring that the looking glass self always responds to interactions with, and the evaluations of, others (Cooley, 1902; Goffman, 1959; Jenkins, 2004; Tajfel, 1982). Seeing ourselves as others see us means that people who want to desist from crime are more likely to do so when significant others here, community members believe in the offenders ability to change and communicate that belief (Maruna et al., 2004, 2009). Second, and similarly, although labelling theory has tended to emphasize the dire consequences of stigma and spoiled identity (Goffman, 1963), and the Golem effect of low expectations leading to poor outcomes, the converse can occur: a Pygmalion effect when high expectations of better things propel a would-be desister to greater self-belief and behaviours which concord with the attainment of better things (Maruna et al., 2009). In overcoming the challenges presented by rep jobs and by the demands of speaking up, residents were enabled to focus not upon their cognitivebehavioural deficits, failings and risk factors, but rather upon their skills, abilities and potential. This capability-building emphasis, as advocates of a good lives model of offender rehabilitation (Ward and Brown, 2004; Ward and Maruna, 2007), strengthsbased resettlement (Burnett and Maruna, 2006; Maruna and LeBel, 2002; Uggen et al., 2004) and altruistic activity by prisoners (Toch, 2000) have identified, bestows self-worth and the agentic determination to reorder the direction of ones life in pursuit of these strengths. The acquisition of new skill sets and discursive resources which are not only consistent with rehabilitation, but positively exclude the behaviours, cognitions and self-concepts favourable towards offending, therefore contributed to the process of differentiation from the old identity and the certification of a new individual committed to change. In trying on and rehearsing new pro-social roles in the TC, residents were thus encouraged, over time, to conceive of themselves as someone worthy of esteem and respect, and capable of more, mastery and generative contribution.

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Developing insight
The more I share my past that I didnt want to share, that I felt embarrassed about, the more stronger I get because then Im letting these painful things go; Im not taking them with me. The past will always be there, but I dont feel its all of me now. (Josephine, Send)

The work of small group therapy allows residents to tell the story of their life, including their history of offending and the specific detail of their index offence(s). This digging and delving into ones past, exploring the recesses of childhood memories, excavating traumas against which the perpetrator of violence has been psychically defended for many years, revealing guilty secrets, hidden things, nasty things about me, that Im ashamed of, that Ive never told no one (Alan, Grendon), examining in unflinching detail the thought processes behind calamitous decisions and the emotional states experienced during offending, probing the connections between what has been done to the offender and what he has done and thus the projection of his pain onto his victims, is the very essence of forensic psychotherapy. It involves a search for understanding and meaning and requires both a willingness to reflect upon ones life and to allow ones narrative identity to be challenged and changed as a consequence of that self-reflection. The TCs interest in the whole life story, however also ensured that residents could move beyond their imposed master status of offender or prisoner, whose cognitive deficits and risk factors define the parameters of treatment, to that of the individual with a multi-faceted life history and multi-dimensional needs, and for whom the commission of criminal offences was only one neither fundamental nor permanent element of that identity. Such contextual and holistic understanding was not to deny the seriousness of the offence or the offenders responsibility for it; indeed residents were acutely attuned to self-pitying sad tales (Goffman, 1961) and techniques of neutralization (Sykes and Matza, 1957) and could subject their group members to a robust crossexamination, worthy of any prosecuting Queens Counsel. After all, you cant con a con. Nor did this wider interest in the offenders life minimize the importance of risk assessment for the TC staff who must still recognize, record and manage that risk. If, however, as Alexander Chase claimed, to understand is to forgive, even oneself, then comprehension of and reflection upon why one has committed heinous offences is necessary if one is to escape from the trauma of ones past, heal ones damaged and damaging self-concept and reposition ones prospective self-narrative to allow for a happier and personally meaningful future. For TC residents, then, telling ones story was essential in order to make links between what otherwise seemed like wholly unconnected or indeed determinedly compartmentalized aspects of the life story, but which in fact connected to illuminate the true meaning (Charles, Grendon) behind their actions, and the emotional stuff [thats] gone on that turns us to the way we are (Tony, Grendon). Residents narrative plotlines exposed, situated and hence humanized their actions, but also challenged the damaging and self-limiting notions some residents had unconsciously created and passively accepted about the inevitability of their life history, and the tentacular ability of crime to grasp hold of an individual and intertwine itself into every aspect of ones identity. Thieving, violence, was normal in my family may have worked as an explanation for

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the residents initiation into crime but within the scrutiny of the small group, the determinism it contained was challenged by any evidence that the resident was already deviating from the story by which he or she had lived. The narrative could thus be reframed to reflect the adoption of a new normality, of attitudes, values and behaviours, within the new normative milieu of the TC, and its implications for narrative emplotment beyond the TC explored. This process was experienced by some residents as an explicitly reconstructive endeavour, in which they perceived the purpose of therapy as like a jigsaw puzzle, with all of these pieces on the table, and Ive got to put them in, one by one, to make the full picture of my life (Jenny, Send). Previously, the cognitive and affective factors, and hidden motivations of the choices they had made, including to offend, had been invariably mysterious to them. These men and women had been, in their own self-assessment, closed off to their emotions, in denial about their lives and unknown, partially or completely, even to themselves. The work of the small group exposed this opaque internal world to the light of therapeutic insight, prompting the disclosure of the residents past, the psychological truths (McAdams, 1993: 12) it contained for the story teller and the potential for a re-storied self. As one senior GTC resident explained:
I needed to cry out and feel sad and I needed to feel this hate for myself and to feel the shame and guilt and to give that child that I was, a voice. Being here has enabled me to cry I can see now how everything in my life stems from what happened to me as a child and how all the mistakes Ive made, and masking everything with drugs and alcohol, and the murder I committed, all are related to not being able to deal with emotions before I like myself now. I have much more peace of mind. I feel able now to draw a line under the past and move on. Im not carrying around all that self-hatred any more, and its completely changed the way I see myself and other people, because Ive learned to trust people again here Ive discovered who I am.

Discussion: Desistance in Process

Definitions of desistance stress the difficulties of proclaiming that a person who once committed crime has, in fact, permanently and irrevocably now ceased to do so. One might argue that desistance can only ever truly be determined retrospectively, after the offenders death (Maruna, 2001), or at least, after significant crime-free gaps (Bottoms et al., 2004: 370). These caveats, of course, alert one to the folly of claiming that imprisoned TC residents or indeed, anyone serving a custodial sentence can desist from crime. If one understands desistance, however, as a causal process which begins prior to, and continues after, the outcome of termination (Laub and Sampson, 2001: 11), and which, after Lemert (1951), includes a secondary desistance in which the would-be exoffender assumes the role or identity of a changed person (Maruna et al., 2004: 274; Maruna and Farrall, 2004), then it is appropriate to recognize that for those residents who responded well to the TC regime, desistance in progress was identifiable while in the TC. For as much as TCs were described as providing a rehabilitative changing house (Johnny, Grendon) with opportunities [that] are endless everything is here to help you change (Andrew, Grendon), participants were also emphatic that its hard work and its head fucking (Stewart, Grendon) and very painful (Keith, Grendon) and it was for

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them to do the hard, painful work to change: theres no magic wand here, you have to rip yourself apart and put in the work to become a better person (Natalie, Send). Thus while the TC had clearly provided residents with the initial hook for change and the continuing supporting structure upon which to hang their aspirations for change, residents portrayed themselves as agentic individuals, actively choosing to pursue change and intending to control the future direction of their life. Accordingly, interviewees could recount numerous ways in which they were consciously aware that they were changing and could connect these changes to prospective desistance, because their revised self-concept no longer supported or was compatible with offending: Im just not the person I was, and the person I am now, isnt interested in the kind of things that land you in prison (Neil, Grendon). Their claims of desistance in process could rightly be described as evidence-based because they were founded upon what residents had achieved and had been told by the looking glass of others they were achieving, and which logically explained to themselves and others why they were just not the person they once were:
Sometimes its hard to measure how well youve done, aint it, but my people outside, they knew me as the person I was and when I see them now, they say, Youve changed so much I feel different anyway, but Im definitely doing something right because my people say they can see the new me I think I can take with me the changes I done here. I never had no hope before, never saw my life being no different, but now, I am like a new person; I am different, and my life outside will be too. (Lenny, Grendon) That was seismic for me, that I didnt react [to a perceived threat of violence and status challenge]. I wasnt sitting there thinking, do the fucker which would have been my instinct two years ago I was thinking that he wasnt worth it; that it wasnt a mature, right thing for me to do to respond violently. And it tells me that if I can do it with that dickhead Ive had to tolerate for months here, I can do it with a stranger. (Dominic, Grendon) There was a time when I really had very little empathy. Now, I can understand another persons point of view, another persons pain So I cant offend any more. People are not objects; they are valuable human beings, with thoughts and feelings. I cant hurt anyone now, because I understand what that hurt feels like. Id never felt my own pain before here, never mind have empathy for someone elses pain, but once you do, you know, it changes everything. (Muktar, Grendon)

Such confidence may appear to those familiar with the phenomenon of re-offending to be, at best, naively optimistic, and at worst, wilfully deluded. One may well protest, well, they would say that, wouldnt they? However, hope for and belief in ones ability to desist is empirically correlated with the long-term achievement of measurable desistance and reduced risk of reoffending (Burnett and Maruna, 2004; Martin and Stenmac, 2010). Notably, the Oxford University dynamics of recidivism study (Burnett, 1992, 2004) confirmed that property offenders who articulated, prior to release, their firm belief that they would desist, were most likely to do so. Ebaughs (1988) sociological study of role exit also demonstrated that people who consciously and deliberatively discard a redundant identity in favour of an equally actively constructed new identity, are more likely to ensure their exit from the past becomes irreversible.

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The magnitude of this renegotiated storied self also needs to be understood within the context of these research participants offending and prison histories. In the custodial sentences these residents had already served and the correctional interventions they had previously successfully completed, prior to reoffending again, nothing had occurred to foster any hope for change, or indeed, any plausible, evidence-based grounds for hope. All earlier attempts at rehabilitation had produced little or no impact upon their willingness or ability to desist from crime, or had fundamentally challenged their view and expectations of themselves and of others; let alone had invited existential meditations upon who they really were and might dare to imagine they could become. These interviewees had simply not encountered, in normal prisons, a social environment supportive of rehabilitation or one able to nurture, reinforce and sustain an emergent self committed to rehabilitation. It is not therefore fanciful to propose that when TC residents were able to enumerate the ways in which they were different, and were enabled to rehearse new roles and capabilities in the TC which reinforced that progress towards difference, they could create their own self-fulfilling prophecy and embed it within the reconstructed narrative identity actual desisters have been found to achieve. Hopelessness had been replaced by hope, and low self-esteem by self-confidence and self-efficacy. A desistance-friendly future was possible because there was already evidence of change in the TC: in residents therapeutic discoveries and emotional disentanglement from their old self, the prosocial roles they assumed and associated normative capabilities and qualities they internalized, the daily living-learning situations they successfully negotiated and the support and validation of their fellow community members. In short, interviewees had created the necessary cognitive shifts to revise fundamentally the ways in which they identified themselves, and in so doing, had become less likely to revert to an old offending self and more likely to choose to retain the preferred new me.

Concluding Comments
Ive become here the person Ive always wanted to be; the person thats always been there underneath but was scared to come out and got covered up with all the bollocks of my lifestyle and attitudes I am the person now I was always meant to be, but who got lost somewhere along the way. (Neil, Grendon) Before GTC, I was kind of lost and really broken ... Ive changed so much. I honestly dont believe I will ever offend again because Im not that person now. Ive found a better person here. (Ben, GTC)

This article, based on exploratory research which sought to privilege TC residents accounts of their experiences, proposes that the therapeutic community, with its commitment to a radically different penal culture and mode of rehabilitation, socially enables, produces and reinforces the emergence of someone different. The creation of a temporary escape identity in prison is admittedly unremarkable as a student, lawyer or sportsman, for example (Jewkes, 2002) and unilateral declarations of reform are not uncommon, or at least, an expressed desire not to return to prison. The TC, however,

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presented the desister as an admirable and permanently achievable identity because the indicators of rehabilitation were already discernible, to the resident and to others, and was thus, uniquely within these research participants experiences, able to communicate to them the genuine possibilities for other selves and other futures. This constructive re-imagining of self and concomitantly, refashioned narrative trajectory was made possible because residents lived within a community which encouraged them to envisage and practice, through meaningful, rehabilitative-focused activities and the pursuit of a holistic understanding of their life history, a cohesive replacement self. First then, it mattered that the TC was different: that it pursued a penal counter-culture as a therapeutic community with a pronounced ethos of change (Stevens, 2011), for whom the constitution of their social identity could become an act of power (Laclau, 1990: 33, cited in Hall, 2000: 18). Through the discursive signage of differentiation in the TC, residents were endowed with a symbolically significant sense of collective internal definition (Jenkins, 2004: 82), and approval for their shared ambition to change. As Jenkins (2004: 79, emphases in original) observed, Logically, inclusion entails exclusion, if only by default Defining us involves defining a range of thems also. The shared us or social identity residents enjoyed as members of a superior penal club inherently contrasted with, and encouraged the repudiation and disengagement of, all things that constitute the thems of the system, including their own old former offender identity. Second, residents were encouraged, through their democratized engagement in and responsibility for their community, to assume a repertoire of self-esteem enhancing and capacity-building roles and to demonstrate attributes and identities not normally associated with incarcerated criminals, and thus to perceive of difference within themselves: the Pygmalion effect of higher expectations resulting in higher performance (Maruna et al., 2004). The pursuit of the full picture of residents lives in group therapy, meanwhile, enabled them to understand how their past had influenced their present but need not dictate their future. Residents could thus sew the constituent parts of their life into the kind of cohesive redemption script Maruna identified among his desisters, which both made sense of the past and made credible a desistance-focused future. The new, or newly expressed and endorsed, identities, functions and characteristics which residents accumulated gradually empowered them to erect a psychological boundary between the system inmate they were, the TC resident they are and the better person they aspired to become. Just as Marunas desisters and persisters revelled in polarized cognitive understandings of their lives, so the research participants in this study cognitively divorced the person I was from the person I am now and wanted to remain. Accordingly, this article develops existing understandings of the enablement of change in TCs, and endorses studies of desistance which emphasize the importance of progressive and positive changes to ones narrative identity, and the reassessment and repositioning of the old self as a bridge, rather than a barrier, to an ideal new self and post-release life. Beyond the blunt instrument of reconviction studies, however, researchers still know very little about the durability of rehabilitation, the TC way, beyond the TC; and consequently one cannot know whether the TC does, in fact, produce and sustain desistance among its graduates. Further qualitative longitudinal research, including eventual evaluation of the post-TC psychologically informed planned environments now being piloted

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in four prisons,9 is therefore needed to determine whether the improvements to residents personal identities this research identified were maintained, and thus whether graduates were truly enabled, as Giddens put it, to keep the narrative going. Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes
1. North American readers will be more familiar with hierarchical or concept TCs, which specialize in the treatment of substance abuse, both in the community and in prison. 2. Both TCs and cognitive-behavioural programmes aim to impact upon the offenders thinking and behaviour but in attempting to achieve this outcome, differ markedly in their approach and scope. TCs investigate the hidden emotional meanings behind their residents pathological behaviours. They argue that the historical causes of problems must be uncovered and understood in order to tackle effectively the symptoms of distress, including but not confined to offending. Therapy is largely unstructured, non-directive and open ended, but is expected to require at least 18 months, with residencies of two years or more usual. Cognitive-behavioural programmes seek to teach rational offenders how to monitor and modify their here-and-now faulty thinking and risky behaviours. These programmes theorize that offending results from generic and readily identifiable criminogenic cognitive deficits and behavioural patterns, and are delivered in accordance with a detailed, structured, programme-specific treatment manual and last for a pre-determined duration of less than one year. 3. I describe the research as semi-ethnographic in recognition that it is impossible for any free world researcher to become completely immersed in, or truly experience the realities of, the prison. Owen (1998: 2022) prefers quasi-ethnography for similar reasons. 4. Notable exceptions to this categorization are Miller et al.s (2006) co-researcher approach with prisoner focus groups, Smartts (2001) collection of Grendon tales and Wilson and McCabes (2002) analysis of three autobiographies penned by Grendon graduates. 5. The minimum residency criterion for participation was three months. 6. The chronological order and relative importance of these changes a puzzle which LeBel et al. (2008) term the chicken and egg of subjective and social factors remains unclear. 7. Prison Service Instruction 201132 Ensuring Equality, section H.6. 8. Call me Mister, Letters to the editor, Inside Time, December 2010. For representative media coverage of Mr Gunns complaint and its implications, see the The Daily Telegraph, 6 December 2010: He may be a murderer, but prison staff must call him Mr. 9. These environments are intended to support and consolidate changes achieved elsewhere, including in TCs; see: http://www.personalitydisorder.org.uk/news/wp-content/uploads/DHNOMS_ PIPE2011_Info.pdf.

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Biography Alisa Stevens is a Lecturer in Criminal Justice Studies at the University of Kent. Her research and teaching interests focus on the correctional services and offender rehabilitation. Her book, Offender Rehabilitation and Therapeutic Communities: Enabling Change the TC Way will be published by Routledge.