Righting recidivism: unlocking the cognitive underpinnings of successful interventions to reduce reoffending

Recidivism is one of the greatest socio-economic burdens the UK currently faces. At an estimated total cost of £18.1 billion a year, prison re-entry places a substantial burden on the national economy. This exacerbates reoffending's associated societal costs, including deviance, unstable communities and displacement. There is a 48% chance that an offender will go on to re-offend within a 12-month period, worsening the current prison overcrowding crisis, which is associated with severe mental health issues and a spread in infectious diseases. Re-offending rates are currently stable in the UK, providing an ideal time to conduct research into reducing them and the burden they place on the economy and wider civil society.

We already know that powerful group identities lead people to enact extraordinary behaviours for their groups - from hardcore football fans travelling the globe for a game to gang members committing atrocities against their rivals. Can this problem be turned on its head to provide a solution? Can group passion be harnessed for the social good? More specifically, how can we foster positive social identities that are powerful enough to re-write offenders' self-narratives? I will apply the theoretical framework of 'identity fusion' - an intense, lasting form of social bonding - to prison populations. For the first time, this research integrates literatures on fusion to sports identities (as a catalyst for reform), shared experiences, women's roles in offending communities as well as men's, and approaches to intervention implementation.

The proposed seven-year research project crosses disciplines and methodologies, and has secured support from major non-academic partners to address these questions, including the MoJ, HMPPS and the Twinning Project - a nationwide intervention that pairs major football clubs with prisons and gives football-industry training and sustainable social identities to prisoners. Primarily informed by anthropology, psychology and criminology, the project will create novel tools using cross-cultural practices, which can be applied nationwide to affect positive, viable societal change. This research is further supported by two postdoctoral researchers, a core team of carefully selected mentors, and five additional UK and international collaborators.

Crucially, I focus on women within this framework - as pivotal actors within both the justice system and the communities that receive ex-offenders - though they are much neglected in both the literatures on identity fusion and re-offending. Despite representing just 5% of offenders, women account for a disproportionately high cost to the criminal justice system: policing females alone is estimated at £1bn a year. Nonetheless, they are also a particularly vulnerable population: 60% will have experienced domestic violence, around 25% have dependent children, and many of them self-harm (five times as many as men).

As a recognised expert on social bonding and violence among football fans, I will draw upon my theoretical and applied knowledge to analyse existing interventions, design a toolkit for future interventions, and implement the researched practices in particularly vulnerable and critical populations (e.g. female and young offenders). This project will afford me recognition as a world leader in my field and help to grow a team of inter-disciplinary researchers, united by a passion to tackle reoffending.

Who will benefit from this research?
(1) The public sector
(2) Charities and their practitioners
(3) Civil society and the wider public; and
(4) The private sector, i.e. agencies / businesses seeking consultation.

Immediate beneficiaries of the research include the project's charity partners and public bodies. These are The Twinning Project and Boats Not Bars, and the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and Her Majesty's Prison & Probation Service (HMPPS). These 'users' of the outputs will have the most immediate gains, relating to statistical and qualitative analyses of sports- and menstruation-based interventions running in UK prisons, with a cross-cultural comparison of best practice in the English-speaking world, primarily the USA and Australia. In the long term, civil society should benefit from the economic and community-derived effects of reduced recidivism, once the results are implemented via a toolkit of applicable strategies. This will be shared with key stakeholders, including: public sector and charity partners, the general public via an interactive report, and policy-makers at UK or international level. As a result, this project will be the springboard for sustainable approaches to social identity-driven community engagement, with inclusion of women at the fore, leading to improved quality of life for those at risk of reoffending. Indirect beneficiaries therefore include the general public.

Both public and private sectors are likely to be indirect beneficiaries gaining from the consultation unit that will emerge from the latter stages of the research, providing lasting impact that I will continue to lead beyond the Fellowship. Openness with users of the research will be achieved via: open access articles and datasets; public dissemination of findings at conferences and public workshops; engagement via the media, particularly television and radio; and a freely-accessible toolkit to guide social-identity driven interventions with high risk groups made available on my website and other platforms.

How will they benefit from this research?
I already have relationships with the MoJ, HMPPS, and the charities, to the extent that I have recently been inundated with requests to evaluate further sports-initiatives by numerous major football clubs. These key stakeholders will be active in the project, from design, to data collection, and improving interventions based on results. In Years 6 & 7, I will share the longitudinal analyses, which offer a rare glimpse into the 24m reoffending period. For the first time, I will share results concerning identity fusion among offenders in the UK. This will help target future initiatives for participants who may have underachieved during existing courses. There will be opportunities to share preliminary data with these stakeholders during Task milestones, helping to shape the trajectory of the interventions.

Currently, many interventions focus on participants who are on 'good behaviour', who may be over-subscribed to interventions. This research aims to encourage randomised trials that include a larger remit of prison populations, leading to diversified tactics, framing course success in relation to the journey of an individual. This timing gives me ample opportunity to engage with policy makers, NGOs and governmental agencies to identify an audience who is prepared to engage with the results and push the toolkit and future interventions forward. Perhaps most importantly, the UK's global performance as a leader in solving some of the industrialised world's most challenging issues, incarceration, will be increased as a result of this body of research and its relevance to strategies for reform and security on the international stage.