Here at POPS we love to celebrate and promote excellence. We recently came across ‘The Road from Crime’, a fantastic film produced as part of a project to improve understanding about why people desist from offending. Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and George Mason University, the project has been lead by Fergus McNeill from the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research at the University of Glasgow. As advocates of the role of families in promoting desistance we think this is a great resource to encourage wider thinking around the topic of desistance and the importance of user-led service development. Check it out below!
If you want to find out more about the wider project or you would like to comment on the film visit the Discovering Desistance Blog.
Film Summary from www.iriss.org.uk
‘The exit at the prison gate often appears to be a revolving door with nearly 60% of released prisoners re-offending within two years of their release. Prisons and probation departments have, almost literally, tried everything in efforts to rehabilitate offenders over the past century, but the results have been uniformly bleak leading many to conclude that “nothing works.” In the past ten years, however, a group of criminologists have hit upon what should have been an obvious source of inspiration for prisoner rehabilitation: the other 40 per cent!
In this timely and compelling documentary, Allan Weaver, a Scottish ex-offender turned probation officer (author of the book So You Think You Know Me?) asks a simple question: What can we learn from those former prisoners who have successfully “desisted” from criminal behaviour or “gone straight?”’
