Phil Bowen
There’s the old joke about the Buddhist hot dog seller. Accepting a ten dollar bill for a two dollar hotdog, he remains still and silent. When asked by the buyer for the eight bucks back, he remains motionless and says, “Ah, change comes from within.” Rather incongruously, this joke came to me when I was sat in a magistrates’ court this week. Anyone who sits in court, as observer or staff, will know that very often it feels like change does not come, from within or without. The same cases and, many times, the same faces. And, in the face of new reforms, new policies, new initiatives, the old truisms seem to remain, the revolving door clatters away unabated. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
And yet, we know, from research and from personal experience, that this is not so, that people do change. We know that most people, given the right support, at the right time, can and do turn away from crime. We know this is often because of little things— an excellent probation officer, a newly discovered passion for art or music, a significant relationship, a new found responsibility. This humane talent to change, given the fancy name desistance by criminologists, is latent in almost all of us. Only the truly sick, the truly bad, do not see nor seek the ability to change, do not eventually discover the old fashioned virtues of the golden rule.
I have been pondering on change, in beginning to formulate my response to the first annual open question posed by the Monument Trust Fellowship. The Centre is one of a small band of organisations whose work spans across the justice system, who have come together because we believe in people’s capacity to change and believe the system should have faith in them too. In working together, we have decided to provoke debate about crime and justice with an annual question, this year’s being “What do prisoners and ex-offenders need to learn?”
In the coming months, we shall be asking others to reflect on this question, to interpret it and answer it in their own way. For my part, my answer is that it is within prisoners and ex-offenders to change, just as it is in within all of us. In that sense, it is a lesson that requires not so much teaching to, as believing in. In a world whose horizons can sometimes seems constrained by the poverty of management speak and the blurb driven, sound-bite tested nonsense that sometimes masquerades as policy, talk of hope and change can sometimes seem naïve (and, sin of all sins, costly). But hope and change, or redemption if you have religious bent, are interwoven into any aspirational vision of a better justice system and the good life because they are there to be stirred in the heart of everyone. And as we open up the question to others, I expect to return to the themes of change, again and again.