The Importance of Incorporating Lived Experience in Efforts to Reduce Australian Reincarceration Rates

Abstract

It is widely acknowledged that ‘good policy’ should be informed by the people it most directly affects. In Australia, the value of drawing on lived experiences in the development and delivery of services has recently been noted in health areas, such as disability and mental health. However, learning from people with lived experiences in the criminal justice sector, such as people who have served time in prison, has received little attention. This article discusses the significance of and challenges related to capturing the voices of people who are currently serving time or have served time in prison. We argue that formalising the perspectives of these individuals into policymaking through co-design processes may be an important method for enhancing program responses to rising incarceration and reincarceration rates.

Inclusive Research: Is the Road More or Less Well Travelled?

“…Whilst the importance of community researchers has long been acknowledged in disability studies, the employment of community researchers and other inclusive research or participatory research practices is comparatively underdeveloped in projects investigating the experiences of people serving time in prison and upon release (see Abbott et al 2018;Awenat et al 2018;Crabtree et al 2016;Doyle et al 2021a;Haarmans et al 2020;Lewis and Ditloff 2021;Sullivan et al 2008). The limited literature available on service user involvement in prison and post-prison research sometimes conflates service users as participants contributing data, with service users as research co-collaborators guiding and influencing the study as a whole (Awenat et al 2018).…”

“…Whilst the importance of community researchers has been acknowledged in the disability literature for several decades as part of the movement towards 'inclusive research' or 'participatory research' Vaughan et al 2019), these practices are far less developed and employed in research about people who are currently in prison or have spent time in prison (Awenat et al 2018;Haarmans et al 2020;Watson and van der Meulen 2019). This is particularly true in Australia (Doyle et al 2021a;Lewis and Ditloff 2021). We argue that employing community researchers in this space is important as people in prison, or who have spent time in prison, are likely to experience a complex intersection of marginalising social structures such as race, mental ill health, and socioeconomic disadvantage.…”

Interventions to Prevent Prison Violence: A Scoping Review of the Available Research Evidence

“…For example, both GVI and Operation Ceasefire are based on a model of violence prevention that relies on collaboration between staff and people in prison. The need to work with services users, - rather than to ‘manage’ or ‘treat’ them - is increasingly being identified as an aspect of service delivery that is likely to result in better outcomes (see Doyle et al, 2021), with recent work conducted in Denmark (Jaspers et al, 2019) providing a good example of how these types of ‘problem solving’ approaches can be rigorously evaluated using a program logic approach.…”