Imagining Possible Futures: Activating Lived Experience in Criminal Justice

This Fellowship is urgent given the growing numbers of people cycling through systems of punishment. 10.74 million people are now imprisoned globally (Walmsley 2018). Reoffending rates are high in most Western countries and many jurisdictions have experienced an expansion in incarceration. In England and Wales, the prison population has risen by 70% to 83,0000 in the last 30 years, maintaining the highest imprisonment rate in Western Europe, despite static or falling crime rates (Tomczak and Bennett, 2020). 243,000 people are supervised in the community (MOJ, 2022) and 6,700 voluntary organisations work within criminal justice (Clinks, 2016). Despite the scale of state and voluntary sector interventions in England and Wales, reoffending continues to be significant, with rates of 23%-31% costing around £18 billion annually (MOJ, 2023).

Innovation is required to help develop alternatives to bloated and ineffective penal systems. An area of promise is participatory criminal justice, wherein people draw on experiences of criminalisation to (re-)evaluate and (co-)deliver justice systems (Buck, 2020). Such 'peer' led practices have the potential to promote desistance from crime by offering people new social skills, connections, and opportunities to 'do' and 'make' good. People with lived experience also often make highly motivated, empathic, knowledgeable actors who can make credible links with communities and provide fresh thinking, ideas and solutions (Criminal Justice Alliance, 2019). Analysis of experiential knowledge and participatory action will additionally enable examination of deeper philosophical and ethical assumptions attached to ideas of 'justice', and how these are expressed, understood and embodied in people with lived experience.

Across criminal justice, lived experience involvement is increasingly prominent. Criminalised people take on voluntary and paid roles as researchers, educators, practitioners (peer supporters, prison council and equality representatives, co-producers and leaders of services), policy and practice advisors, and (academic) authors advancing criminological theory. Despite this expansion, empirical and theoretical work has not been commensurate. There have been some reviews and case studies of coproduced criminal justice in different countries (Weaver, 2019; Loeffler and Bovaird, 2020; Johns et al., 2023), but there is a need for a fuller evidence base, including examples from racially minoritised co-producers, who are over-represented in systems of punishment, but under-represented in the knowledge base of participatory criminal justice.

Service user movements in the fields of disability, substance use, and mental health have radically advanced a social model of health and a critical field of 'Mad studies' (Beresford and Russo, 2016), yet criminalised people are often overlooked as participants and activists. Using a range of innovative, participatory, arts-informed research methods, this Fellowship will critically examine, and advance understanding of, participation and coproduction in criminal justice. Creative, collaborative methods can facilitate inclusive, transformative co-creation and begin to flatten the power hierarchies entrenched in criminal justice (Harding, 2020). Drawing on Co-I Murray's (2019) concept of 'Criminological Artivism', developed during her 9 years as Criminologist in Residence at FACT (film, art and new media gallery, Liverpool), the team will use speculative, artistic practices to amplify marginalised voices and facilitate imaginative praxis. Speculative criminology is an area of innovation with potential to re-imagine hopeful futures.

In partnership with stakeholders, including a diverse group of experts by experience, the study will: document a history of participatory criminal justice; critically examine contemporary approaches to participation and coproduction and use speculative design to explore future possibilities.