Objectives

The pilot known as ‘My Direction’ operates in the English criminal justice system. It is about new ways to work with service users to create and implement personalised plans for their rehabilitation, while delivering the sentence of the court. ‘My Direction’ is intended to help people on probation to become more active participants in their own rehabilitation. It does this by making the sentence plan better able to take into account issues which beneficiaries themselves consider to be important. The pilot is informed by theory from criminology called ‘desistance’, which departs for more mainstream thinking in emphasizing the agency of offenders. ‘Desistance’ aligns closely with co-creation by recognizing the importance of offender agency, assets, and relationships.

Learnings

The following are identified as lessons learned in the UK pilot

1. Notwithstanding its many set-backs and disappointments, the My Direction pilot demonstrates that elements of co-creation can be extended to non-voluntary service contexts despite the many challenges this entails.
2. The external policy environment can impede co-creation. This happened in the My Direction pilot as a side effect of national policy change rather than an intention. Agendas not directly related to co-creation affect the outcome of attempts to introduce it.
3. Although case managers were generally receptive to ‘person centred practice’, some of them resisted what they saw as the loss of professional control entailed in putting cash sums in the hands of offenders to pursue personal rehabilitation goals. This pushed the limits of co-creation from the perspective of front-line practitioners.[They were also worried about negative publicity ie. being seen as ‘soft on criminals’. This is an obsession of the British popular press and widely amplified in social media – see point 6.]
4. Some CoSIE pilots situate the barriers to co-creation squarely in the mind sets of public administrators and policy makers. Point 3 above notwithstanding, the experience of the UK pilot suggests a much more fundamental explanation. Co-creation does not sit easily within principles of New Public Management and reports of the death of and New Public Management are exaggerated. The reforming agenda and emphasis on innovation under Transforming Rehabilitation appeared to support co-creation but in practice the reporting regime and the payment by results model of CRC contracts directly countered it.
5. Desistance implies building community links and strengthening social capital. Collaborative engagement with community organisations was a major strand of the My Direction Theory of Change. Ultimately, it was too demanding for a community group such as Time Bank with a strong ethos of trust to relate to aspects of working with offenders such as managing risks. The lesson to be taken away from this is – never under estimate the barriers to working across agencies with very different priorities, values and worldviews. Cross agency, cross sector work can potentially offer gains that single agencies cannot make alone. But a hard lesson is that its pitfalls cannot be wished away.
6. It is unlikely that any simplistic enthusiasm for co-creative possibilities of mainstream commercial social media has any traction at all in the real world of criminal justice. What has been highly innovative and successful, in contrast, is the imaginative adaption of digital technologies for ethically responsible, curated storytelling in a service context entirely hostile to commercial social media.

Read more about the pilot at the Cosie project homepage