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Peacock, Megan --- "A Third Space between the Prison and the Community: Post Release Programs and Re-integration" [2008] CICrimJust 33; (2008) 20(2) Current Issues in Criminal Justice 307

A Third Space between the Prison and the Community: Post Release Programs and Re-Integration[†]

Abstract

Post release programs are typically understood as functioning to reintegrate offenders into the community. More critical accounts have reconstructed such integrative programs – as well as the wider restorative justice movement – in terms of metaphors of ‘revolving doors’ and ‘net widening’ effects. These metaphors capture some of their practices and functions. However, my interest is in the way in which a third space has emerged which is neither prison nor community (nor a shuffling between or an expansion of these pre-existing domains), but rather an autonomous field of social life and regulation. The contours of this third space will be delineated with specific reference to the evaluation of the Melbourne Citymission program Women 4 Work.

The reintegration of offenders into the community post-imprisonment is an issue of increasing currency and urgency for state and territory governments across Australia as highlighted by the focus on strengthening communities, supporting families and social inclusion at the recent 2020 summit. Largely re-integration programs are being funded haphazardly; primarily via short term project based approaches that vary considerably in their scope, aim, their impact and their intention. The recent report by the Law and Justice Foundation of NSW emphasised that ex-prisoners experience a ‘confluence of legal problems on release from jail [which] may affect inmates’ capacity to successfully reintegrate into the community’ (2008:92). However, this is an area that requires far more extensive research. Specifically in this comment, I want to delineate the idea of the third space idea which exists between prison and the community for ex-offenders.[1] It offers ideas and asks questions about the reintegration of offenders into the community, making specific reference to the Melbourne Citymission program evaluation of Women 4 Work (W4W) and a case study to illustrate the way in which the prison over reaches into community.

Melbourne Citymission (MCM) is a non-profit organisation that provides resources and choices to those who are marginalised and living with disadvantage. MCM is committed to delivering services that ‘respect the rights of individuals and embrace diversity’ (www.melbournecitymission.org.au). The W4W program is one of the programs run out of Melbourne Citymission in conjunction with Corrections Victoria and the Department of Education and Workplace Relations. It specifically works with women who have exited prison or who have been placed on a community based order (CBO). The W4W program recognises the need to provide specialist employment services to women. The need for specialist employment services is evident in the plethora of prison literature,[2] identifying the barriers and complexity of issues women face when being released from prison, or when they are placed on a community based corrections order. Carlen (1990, 1998, 2002), Singer and Bussey (1995), Pollock (1998), Richie (2001) and Brooker (2007) have all identified issues around mental and physical illness, drug and alcohol issues, physical and sexual abuse, children and family, housing and access to appropriate positive relationships including factors that contribute to female offending and effective rehabilitation for those exiting prison.

The W4W program specifically assists clients with comprehensive job search training; individualised job search planning; up-to-date information on labour market trends; and access to vocational training and support to maintain employment. They work directly out of the women’s prisons in Victoria and in various community corrections offices around Melbourne. It has been shown that employment can reduce re-offending by between one third and one half (Home Office 2002). However, gaining employment according to the Women 4 Work evaluation, women in particular need a great deal of emotional and practical support (Peacock 2007).

The reasoning behind a program that specifically targets employment for women offenders is grounded in terms of reintegration and resettlement programs where employment is engaged as a tool. Employment is one part of a larger holistic approach to reintegration, which aims to assist offenders returning to the community and to reduce reoffending. This idea and practice has been supported by numerous studies (Hamlyn & Lewis 2000; Home Office 2002; McPherson 2007). Employment is recognised as way to enhance and facilitate resettlement by offering a way in which a person can gain, for example, self respect, confidence, and skills, allowing them in theory to become full participating citizens.

On the one hand, employment theoretically can be used as a device to (re)integrate[3] offenders into society and facilitate their social participation. Then, on the other hand, employment can be a place of exclusion. Exclusion from employment can also mean exclusion from other areas, such as the community. For example, a person who is not a tax-paying member of society, or someone who can pay their own way, can be seen as ‘dole-bludging’ or ‘leaches’ on the system. As Jock Young (2003) highlights social exclusion can:

involve economic, political and spatial exclusion as well as a lack of access to specific areas such as information, medical provision, housing, policing, security etc. These dimensions are seen to interrelate and reinforce each other: overall they involve exclusion in what are seen as the normal areas of participation of full citizenship.

The following case study allows for an exploration of the ideas of inclusion and exclusion. It provides an example of a woman who tried to negotiate this area I am referring to as the third space, the place between prison and the community. It is the true story of a client from the Women 4 Work program who was happy for me to use her story to illustrate the path that moves through prison, into the community which is then restricted by community corrections or parole as it is more commonly referred to. Her story serves to demonstrate the difficulties associated with trying to negotiate the fluid boundaries and borders of prison, community corrections and the community through employment. Further, it explores the way employment can serve as a resettlement tool as well as an exclusionary mechanism.

Fran has been in and out of prison for the last 20 years for crimes involving drugs and sex work. She is currently 38 and serving a two-month sentence for breaching her parole order. Fran completed her last sentence two years ago and was released from prison on three and half years of parole. Upon release she was linked with Melbourne Citymission’s Supporting Women Exiting Prison Program and the Women 4 Work Program. With the support from these programs and through her own determination she had got her life back on track. Fran had secured housing and most importantly, employment. Fran was employed as an assistant manager at a dry cleaners, she worked from 7am til 7pm each night and was in charge of balancing the till, banking, and opening and closing the shop.

During this time she took out a loan to buy a car and some furniture and supported herself in private rental. Because of the long hours involved with her job, she failed to report to parole. She was also hesitant to tell her boss that she needed to leave work early once a week so she could report to parole. Her employers did not know that she had a criminal record even though she had worked there for 12 months. Fran, not wanting to be breached by community corrections rang them and requested an external visit – where a community corrections officer can visit the client at their place of work – knowing that she had to report at least once a week as she had done for the past two years. The office refused and consequently Fran was breached. Community Corrections also rang her employers to confirm that she had been working there and they found out she had a criminal record and was promptly fired from her position.

Fran was sent back to prison for two months for not complying with her parole order. Before her incarceration she had to appear in front of the Adult Parole Board – who stated that her compliance to the parole order was more important than gaining and maintaining employment. Fran will be released in January 2008 on 12 months parole.

This case study brings to the fore the ever-present yet overwhelming ignored third space – the space that sits between exclusion (as an imprisoned citizen with limited rights) and inclusion (as a full citizen entitled to freely participate in the community). The contours of the third space demonstrated in this case study are not fixed, they are comprised of multiple layers including practices of surveillance and social control, and the negotiation of individual identity. These are just a few of the issues that Fran is trying to balance and make sense of whilst also dealing with the significant and complex practicalities that can face all ex-prisoners. Her identity is comprised of several labels including ex-prisoner, ex-drug user, woman, client, parolee and employee. The areas either side of this third space that Fran is occupying are the spaces of prison and the community. While Fran may be seeking to move from one space to the other, and while the community and government agencies may equally expect that women like Fran should be trying to simply ‘step across’ the divide through exiting prison – these spaces are in many ways much further apart then currently recognised.

However, Fran was able to negotiate and overcome many of the barriers that ex-offenders face when trying to find and gain employment. Having a criminal record is one of many barriers that women can face. Others include: little or no previous employment, low educational levels, little or no job skills, reporting requirements for parole, child care issues, lack of housing, physical and mental health and age (Zaks 2003).

Fran gained employment and maintained it for a 12-month period. As evidenced in the case study, she began to save and took out loans to purchase furniture – in all respects, steps which would see her included in society. Fran was for all intents and purposes a participating member of society. What then became problematic for Fran was trying to balance her employment with the commitments of parole, her surveillance. Through parole, the expansion of control has extended from the prison into the community for Fran, when she was released from prison and placed on three years parole. This is a particularly long parole period. Parole, facilitated from a community corrections office, requires a person to report in person to a specified office for the duration specified. This reporting can involve, for example, visiting a parole office three times a week. As the person progresses through the parole order, the reporting requirements generally lessen at the discretion of the community corrections officer they have been assigned to. The visits may be reduced to once a month.

While Fran attempts to reintegrate into community she is still attached to the overreach of the prison through parole. As Garland (2001:175) states:

Parole agencies downplay their traditional re-integrative functions, prioritise the close monitoring of released offenders, link more closely with the police, and more frequently return offenders to custody.

Consequently, she occupies this third space that is neither prison nor the community, but a place that continues to shift between both. A space which is excluded and controlled but is disguised by notions of re-integration and re-settlement.

These spaces are contradictory and confused and the rules of this space are uncertain and often arbitrary as exhibited by Fran’s re-incarceration. The space is constantly surveilled even though she is in the community. The contradiction is further emphasised upon her appearance to the parole board where she is told that her first priority is parole rather than employment. This position is a continuation of the third space as a place where ex-offenders are continually told that they are prisoners, a label that is worn like a tattoo, which can never be removed. Ex-offenders are then trapped in this third space which ebbs and flows between the prison and the community, but the space never fully allows the person occupying it to emerge and become an included member of the community.

Employment, while seen as a tool that aids reintegration and has proven to aid reintegration, can also serve to further exclude a person from the community, even though an ex-offender may surrender their previous life in pursuit of one that we may evaluate as ‘normal’. This pursuit can be rendered near impossible because of criminal record checks. Criminal record checks are used to further exclude those with records and can serve to continue marginalisation and reinforce dependence on welfare. Criminal record checks are becoming more and more prevalent. As Bronwyn Naylor’s (2007) work shows Victoria Police conducted 3,459 criminal record checks in the period from 1992 to 1993 and this has increased significantly to 244,361 in the period from 2005 to 2006.[4] It then becomes more and more difficult for prisoners to find employment even where they are seeking low-skilled employment. As Garland (2001:176) highlights:

those offenders who are released ‘into the community’ are subject to much tighter control than previously, and frequently find themselves returned to custody for failure to comply with the conditions that continue to restrict their freedom.

Currently, governments and policy makers see pathways for women exiting prison in a linear or straight forward sense. Exiting prison, getting a job and becoming reintegrated into the community, is a far too simplistic way of viewing this process. Release is neither a linear function nor is it a circle which signifies a revolving door, but rather it is a net – but not the net that Cohen (1985) refers to. Through the figure of this third space we can make visible a much broader net whose lines are technologies of control of which the Women 4 Work program is a part. Being a prisoner often means ‘physically remov[ing] individuals from the broader social framework, it furthers to systematically and structurally (re)inforce their exclusion through their disqualification, disenfranchisement and ineligibility from participation within social arrangements, such as economic, politic or employment systems’ (Bodiam 2006:224).

Consideration must be given to people who have exited prison. It is not reasonable to ask a person to resettle, reintegrate, and participate in the community, when there is a contradictory agenda prioritising the apparent safety of citizens and ignoring ideas of social inclusion. As this comment highlights Fran was a citizen – who was included when she was employed, she became then a non-citizen – who was excluded – when her parole was breached.

Megan Peacock

Victorian Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders, megan.peacock@vacro.org.au

References

Bodiam T 2006 Narratives of post-custodial experiences: surveillance, sobriety and risk. Unpublished PhD thesis

Brooker DJ 2007 ‘The Reentry Process for Women’ in Muraskin R (ed) It’s a Crime: Women and Justice 4th edn Pearson Education Inc Upper Saddle River

Carlen P 1990 Alternatives to Women’s Imprisonment Open University Press Buckingham

Carlen P 1998 Sledgehammer: Women’s Imprisonment at the Millennium McMillan Press Hampshire

Carlen P 2002 Women and Punishment: The struggle for justice Willan Publishing Devon

Cohen S 1985 Visions of Social Control Cambridge Polity

Garland D 2001 The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society Oxford University Press Oxford

Grunseit A, Forell S & McCarron E 2008 Taking Justice into Custody: the legal needs of prisoners Law and Justice Foundation of New South Wales

Hamlyn B & Lewis D 2000 Women prisoners: a survey of their work and training experiences in custody and on release Home Office Research Study 208 Research Development and Statistics Directorate London

Home Office 2002 Breaking the Circle: A report of the review of the rehabilitation of offenders act Home Office United Kingdom

McPherson T 2007 ‘Employment: Offending and reintegration’ in Sheehan R Mclover G, & Trotter C (eds) What Works with Women Offenders Willan Publishing Devon

Naylor B 2007 ‘Criminal Convictions and Employment: Obstacles to ‘Reintegration’ Conference presentation ANZSOC Adelaide

Peacock M 2007 Women 4 Work Quality Audit Melbourne Citymission Research and Social Policy Unit Unpublished Melbourne

Pollock JM 1998 Counseling Women in Prison Sage Publications Thousand Oaks

Richie B 2001 ‘Challenges Incarcerated Women Face as They Return to Their Communities: Findings From Life History Interviews’ Crime and Delinquency vol 47 no 3 pp 368-389

Singer MI & Bussey J 1995 ‘The Psychosocial Issues of Women Serving Time in Jail’ Social Work vol 40 no 1 pp 103-114

Young J 2003 http://www.malcolmread.co.uk/JockYoung/ accessed 10/11/2007

Zaks D 2003 Correctional Services Employment Pilot Program (CSEPP): Literature review of offender employment programs (unpublished paper)


[†] The author would like to thank Peter Rush and Marie Segrave for their comments on earlier versions of this comment.

[1] ‘Offender’ refers to those women who have been charged with an offence who may have been in prison or placed on a Community Based Order (CBO).

[2] Such as Carlen (1990, 1998, 2002), Singer and Bussey (1995), Pollock (1998), Richie (2001), Brooker (2007).

[3] ‘Reintegration’ here is a term that government departments generally use to speak about offenders moving back into the community, there is an assumption that they were integrated before offending.

[4] Fitzroy Legal Service Inc and Job Watch Inc, Criminal Records in Victoria: Proposals for Reform (2005) 8; statistics updated by Victoria Police in communication with the author (Bronwyn Naylor).