Table Of ContentEmotional Literacy in Criminal Justice
Emotional Literacy in
Criminal Justice
Professional Practice with Offenders
Charlotte Knight
School of Applied Social Science, De Montfort University, UK
© Charlotte Knight 2014
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
1 Introduction: The Challenge of Uncovering and Using Emotions
in Criminal Justice 1
2 Emotions and Criminal Justice 18
3 Diversity, Power and Emotion 37
4 Values: Positive and Negative Emotional Control in Work
with Offenders 58
5 Developing Emotional Literacy in Practitioners 84
6 Building Relationships with Offenders 109
7 Using Emotional Literacy to Manage Risk and Change
in Offenders 128
8 Emotions in Organisations 149
9 Strategies for Sustaining Emotional Literacy in the Workplace 171
10 Conclusion 188
Notes 199
Bibliography 200
Index 214
v
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank all the probation staff who, as research participants and
seminar contributors, gave freely of their time, ideas and reflections. I would
like to thank colleagues at De Montfort University for their support and their
insights during the completion of my PhD and the subsequent writing of this
book, in particular Brown, Dave Ward, Jean Hine, Rob Canton, Julie Fish, Jane
Dominey and Sarah Hilder. Thanks to Derek Layder for the use of his models
of social domains and of interpersonal emotional control, and his help in
thinking through their application to the ideas in this book and to Denise
Beardshaw for the opportunity to view emotional intelligence in action in her
school. Particular thanks to my sister Val for her enduring love and support and
to Fiona Purdie for her wisdom and kindness. Most of all my thanks to Sue for
starting me on this road and being my main source of inspiration.
vi
1
Introduction: The Challenge of
Uncovering and Using Emotions
in Criminal Justice
Introduction
We tend to see negative emotions and ‘punitiveness’ as understandable and
appropriate responses to criminality. People who have transgressed the crimi-
nal law and caused harm to others are believed to be deserving of punishment
for their offending regardless of whether this punishment makes any difference
to their likelihood of reoffending in the future. Punishment conveys society’s
disapproval and condemnation of such behaviour. Both media and political
discourse about criminal behaviour use punitive rhetoric and arguments for
increasing levels of external control on offenders. However, the task of crimi-
nal justice practitioners is to manage, control and help offenders with fairness
and decency; a challenging expectation in this culture of punitiveness. This
book outlines the case for developing the skills of emotional literacy and the
use of positive emotions in the criminal justice workforce. In interventions
with offenders, such a skill can help offenders begin to take responsibility for
their behaviour, to develop internal controls and seek to change those aspects
of their behaviour that are the most damaging to society and to themselves.
In all situations it can enable criminal justice practitioners to understand and
regulate their own emotions and to make better informed judgements and
decisions about their practice.
As adults, most of us manage our lives through our ability to think and
respond rationally and logically to the social world in which we live. We are
also emotional creatures who make many of the most important decisions in
our lives, for example, concerning our long-term relationships, our work and
our living arrangements, on the basis of ‘feelings’. We are encouraged to under-
stand the world in which we live through an accumulation of knowledge and
the application of cognitive skills. However, we are also likely to deal better
with our circumstances if we can think intelligently and reflectively about our
1
2 Emotional Literacy in Criminal Justice
feelings and their impact on, and interrelationship with, our cognitive skills
(Howe 2008).
The criminal justice system is constituted to respond to, control and pun-
ish criminal behaviour in an objective, rational and just manner. As far as
possible the system aims to exclude emotion on the basis that emotions are
likely to interfere with and distort the process of justice (Karstedt et al. 2011).
In a parallel process, criminology as the science and academic discipline that
studies crime and criminal justice has been committed to the same ideals of
reason and reasonable discourse in relation to modern penal law and the
practice of criminal justice in its institutions (Karstedt et al. 2011). Karstedt
argues that historically criminal justice and criminology have been suspi-
cious of emotions and that criminology’s approach to emotions has been
cautious and circumspect (Karstedt et al. 2011). However, criminal justice is
an emotional arena, a place where powerful emotions are experienced by,
and impact on, offenders, victims and practitioners (Karstedt et al. 2011).
Practitioners working in this system will encounter people who are often
in highly emotional states associated with, or as a result of, their offending
behaviour, and further aroused by being processed through a system that
is designed to punish and control them, for this behaviour. Workers in the
system have to manage and respond to these emotions, and the emotions
engendered in themselves, on a daily basis. The dichotomy between the
presentation of criminal justice as an emotion-free zone and the reality for
practitioners, offenders, victims and witnesses within the system forms an
important context for this book.
The book concerns itself with the ‘feelings’ and emotional skills of practi-
tioners working within the criminal justice system. It is argued that in working
with a transformative process, the managing of change in an offender popula-
tion, practitioners need to be ‘emotionally available’ to the people they work
with. Punishment can be a blunt instrument in enforcing change, often engen-
dering resentment, shame, fear and powerlessness in its recipients. Whilst pun-
ishing and restricting the liberty of people who have committed very serious
crimes is seen as an essential feature of criminal justice, as a blanket policy it
does little to reach those offenders, the majority, who are capable of change
and development. Emotional literacy, by contrast, is a communicative tool
through which practitioners engage, understand and motivate the offenders
they work with. Whilst punishing people for their criminal behaviour may
make us, as a society, feel ‘avenged’ it has a limited role in affecting real or
positive change in the offenders themselves. The skilfulness and emotional
availability of practitioners can enable an offender to begin to undertake the
hard work of recognising, and accepting responsibility for, the harm they have
caused, and effecting change in their lives in order to reduce the risk of reof-
fending. Practitioners whose role may be more about managing and processing
Introduction 3
offenders through the system (e.g. police and prison officers) will be equally
challenged by the emotional content of their work, and will benefit from hav-
ing a greater understanding and ‘literacy’ in the manner in which they deploy
their feelings in their work.
In any criminal justice practice, an understanding of the values and beliefs
that underpin the work and how they impact on practice should be of cen-
tral concern (Rutherford 1993). The participants in the research for this book
identified the active use of their emotional skills, their ability to engage emo-
tionally and their ability to be ‘non-judgmental’ towards offenders as crucial
to the process of building relationships and enabling positive change in their
lives (Knight 2012). Using the experiences of these probation practitioners who
worked with humanitarian values, the book aims to offer some insights into
the application of emotional literacy for all criminal justice workers.
Practice context
Whilst the modernisation of criminal justice during the 20th century may
have placed ‘reason’ and ‘rationality’ at its core, and largely excluded ‘emo-
tion’, there is a paradox in operation. Karstedt argues that after many decades
of apparent ‘objectivity’, ‘emotionality’ has returned to the criminal justice
arena (Karstedt et al. 2011). There has been a ‘re-emotionalisation of law’
(De Haan and Loader 2002) with the return of ‘shame’ into criminal justice
procedures, in particular through ideas of restorative justice (Braithwaite
1989) and with a stronger focus on victims and their emotional needs. The
public are actively encouraged, through the media in particular, to express
strong feelings in relation to crime and to expect that legislation will reflect
these concerns (e.g. ‘Sarah’s Law’ on the child sex offender disclosure scheme
(Lipscombe 2012)).
The introduction of victim personal statements in which victims of particu-
lar crimes1 are enabled to present to the court the impact that the crime has
had on them and their families has also encouraged the view that sentenc-
ing can be influenced by powerful feelings generated by the harm caused by
crime (Gelsthorpe 2009). This emotionality, identified in terms of ‘the public
demands this or that’ (Gelsthorpe 2009: 191) is used to justify increasingly
harsh punishments and the greater use of imprisonment. Sometimes courts
are influenced directly by the emotions of the event; for example, the sentenc-
ing of people caught up in the riots of 2011 was seen to be responding very
‘toughly’ to an unusual set of circumstances and was commended by politi-
cians at the time. The average prison sentence imposed for people convicted
during the riots was 25% longer than normal, indicative of a more punitive
response (Bottoms 1995, Travis and Simon 2011). Karstedt identifies this as
the emergence of a highly emotional discourse on crime and justice (Karstedt
4 Emotional Literacy in Criminal Justice
et al. 2011), what Bottoms refers to as ‘popular punitiveness’ (Bottoms 1995).
Increasingly, crime policies appear to be based on the expression of the collec-
tive emotions of anger and fear about crime, and politicians are seen to com-
pete with each other to ‘address the emotional needs of the public’ (Karstedt
2002). The depth and impact of powerful emotions generated by the often
traumatic terrain of crime and offending behaviour on practitioners work-
ing in the system, coupled with the ‘emotionality’ of the media and political
discourse on crime and sentencing, confronts the workers in the system with
particular dilemmas and tensions.
The concept of ‘control’ is a significant feature of the work of criminal jus-
tice and emotions are often closely linked to issues of control. Criminal justice
practitioners are expected to control and limit the worst excesses of criminal
conduct. To aid an understanding of how this control is exercised within dif-
ferent criminal justice settings, reference is made to Layder’s theory of inter-
personal emotional control (Layder 2004). Layder identifies a spectrum ranging
from ‘benign’ control, exercised with a largely therapeutic and humanitarian
aim, through to a more ‘malign’ or ‘manipulative’ form of emotional control,
with a repressive aim all of which can be evidenced in criminal justice practice.
The book presents an argument that the instrumental and administrative pro-
cesses of criminal justice are the visible workings of the system, but of equal
importance are these emotional processes, or ‘underground emotion work’
(Layder 2004) undertaken by practitioners which remains largely suppressed,
invisible and unacknowledged.
Although there have been studies of the emotional impact of the work in
terms of stress and burnout in relation to criminal justice practice (Tewksbury
and Higgins 2006, Collins, Coffey et al. 2009, Griffin et al. 2009, Adams and
Buck 2010, Schaible and Gecas 2010) there has been little written about how
criminal justice practitioners actually manage and use their emotions in their
work. Crawley has explored the emotional lives of prison officers (Crawley
2004, Crawley 2009). She identified that in the prison environment prison
officers strive, with more or less success, to achieve a degree of emotional
neutrality and detachment in their work. Van Stokkhom has reflected on the
need for a better understanding of emotion management and emotional intel-
ligence in policing, in the face of challenging and often negative emotional
situations (Van Stokkom 2011). Other writers have examined soft power in
prisons (Crewe 2011) and in relation to offenders (Puglia, Stough et al. 2005).
There is literature that relates it to mental health (Akerjordet and Severinsson
2004), health care (Clarke 2006), and in a range of other settings (Salovey and
Sluyter 1997, Bar-On and Parker 2000). The closest association for this book is
the use of emotional intelligence in the field of social work, which is still in its
infancy (Morrison 2007, Howe 2008), although there is a substantial body of
