|
Hopefully, before you read this preparatory article into an important problem about rehabilitation and those backed to support it, you will comprehend the extent of which money and resource in terms of funding and agents, is available from taxpayers and private companies to deliver transformation in people who perpetrate criminal offences. Let's not suppose that enough money is available to aid the rehabilitation of offenders either. Agencies, community programs and others will all acquiesce that more resource is needed to provide a proper and working rehabilitation program to change offending behaviour.
I am not quarrelling with that diagnosis. However, I have become suspicious, sceptical that the programmes and policies created are not there to create rehabilitation, but rather to support an economy, therefore, managing offenders, rather than rehabilitating offenders. The question you might be asking yourself is what makes me suspicious? In particular of those who are committed to helping offenders rehabilitate.
In terms of my recent scepticisms, and the reason for them existing is all to do with my wanting to get involved in the rehabilitation of offenders. Being an ex-offender, an ex committed criminal for over 10 years and then rehabilitating myself in terms of career and education, I felt I had much to offer in terms of experience and success of changing behaviour and been able to empathise with the difficulties faced by those 'going straight'.
Since graduating from the University of Leeds earlier this year and the opinions of my tutor ringing in my ears regarding my dissertation not been conclusive enough in terms of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 been an apparatus of control and institutionalised oppression. I've only realised recently that the supporting agents and agencies should be questioned thoroughly too.
My recent contacts with numerous agencies and support services have left me speculating. All who I had spoken to have nice words to say in terms of my achievements all had congratulated me. All understood the ongoing problems for people like me, who had gone straight and find themselves still segregated and affected by stigma, discrimination and problems with identity. However, not one, I repeat not one was at all interested in learning more about how I had managed my transformation, not one wanted to advise how I could possibly get involved even though I was requesting to.
Each agency wanted my support for their own particular cause, either by donation or using their findings and their opinions, but nobody wanted to learn how I had learned and become successfully reformed. I realised I was at first attempting to do what they are doing, self promotion, I wanted to promote my ideas, my issues, my solutions. The difference been, I was interested in theirs, they were not interested in my experience or my success.
However, why should they, I did not use their services, I was not aided by their philosophy, I was a self made desister from crime, I had succeeded without thousands of pounds of tax payers money, I was not supporting their cause for more funding.
I'm hoping to become more radical in terms of my opinions, at first I was looking for support and sponsorship to further my aim in helping others understand the problems faced by those becoming rehabilitated. In terms of my scepticisms about the bureaucratic and management agencies of offenders, ex-offenders, and reform. I hope to guide offenders of their own ability to change without finding themselves trapped in a bureaucratic economy of 'caring' and 'supportive' agencies.
I am left wondering what sort of rehabilitation I would have achieved if I had left my will in the hands of these groups of agencies! This is an introduction to my examination of the rehabilitation of offenders in terms of the criminal justice system and its supporting tentacles within the private, voluntary and public sectors. The bureaucratic economy and its docile commodity, the offender.
|
