Originally, this research project was called Lives Sentenced: The Punishment Careers of Persistent Offenders. Now, as you can see from the title of this blog, only ‘Lives sentenced’ remains. I’m hoping to come up with a better tagline.
Persistent offenders was included in the title of the project and funding applications because ‘persistent offenders’ are a group of much concern to politicians, and others who want to reduce offending. This makes sense: the Scottish Government has recently estimated that reoffending costs £3 billion per year and that the 22% of offenders who have more than 10 convictions are a particular problem in this regard (Audit Scotland 2012). Lives Sentenced is very much aimed to find out the views of these people. The recruitment criteria are that someone has had to experience punishment over at least 15 years and that their most recent sentence should NOT be a long-term prison sentence. Most of those who meet these criteria will also have 10 convictions, or at least so I assume. Why not call them persistent offenders, then?
Part of the problem is in the term ‘offender’. Authors who have been imprisoned have written that they find the term‘offenders’ offensive, because it categorises and dehumanises the people at the receiving end of the criminal justice process (Richards & Jones 2004). Also, by labelling people as ‘offenders’, we are in effect highlighting a (possible) facet of their identity that we should all hope, given the evidence on desistance, is not the overriding factor in how they see themselves. I think ‘persistent offender’ is worse, because if I recruited people as ‘persistent offenders’ would I not be pre-supposing that they will persist?
In any case, I’m not actually interested in people’s offending, but in the way they see their punishments. What is a useful alternative term, then? The persistently punished? Should the title of this blog be ‘Lives Sentenced: The Meaning of Persistent Punishment? Any suggestions are more than welcome!