Problems with the egalitarian ideal

Lancaster’s (1988) critique also gets to the heart of an issue, which will be a recurrent theme in this study, that is: the legitimacy of identity positions which appear to have crossed a border. The ex-offender, for example, has been an offender and is now a desister. Her or his knowledge of lived reality therefore straddles two identity positions; they can relate to both the experience of being an offender and to being a desister. Similarly Paulo Freire was a part of the oppressed poor in Brazil but became a prominent teacher and theorist. His knowledge of lived reality, too, straddled two very different identity positions. Whilst Lancaster is partially correct to identify a ‘teacher-vanguard’ element to Freire’s argument (wherein he positions himself as an external teacher initiating and releasing those currently less able), he misses the significance of Freire’s own history. What marks him out for Lancaster (1988) is his crossing the border from dispossessed learner to recognised theorist, which then highlights a tension. When do ‘the oppressed’, powerless or stigmatized, by empowering themselves, leave the shared struggle, or even come to be viewed as part of the oppression? Is the border of two identities a space from which one

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can legitimately speak from and to both sides of the border, or will tensions of voice arise? To use Goffman’s terms (1963: 39) it may be inevitable that ‘native leaders… instead of leaning on their crutch, they get to play golf with it, ceasing, in terms of social participation, to be representative of the people they represent’. A potential problem with straddling two perceived identity positions (be it ‘pauper’ and ‘theorist’ or ‘offender’ and ‘mentor’), however, is that it may weaken the credibility or authenticity of the message for some listeners.

Regardless of whether or not learners within critical pedagogy need to be ‘taught to surrender their passivity’ (Lancaster, 1988: 199), it is clear that protégés in this model are not inert receptors, but necessarily active agents. Indeed Freire argues that:

No pedagogy which is truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models from among the oppressors. The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption (Freire, 1970: 36).

To a degree peer mentoring exemplifies this ideal. Ex-offenders, as stigmatized ‘others’, come to occupy spaces of power within the educational exchange when they become mentors; unseating ‘distant’ professionals and coming to set their own example. This represents a potential dissolution of the power dynamic Freire critiques, given that ex- offenders come from a shared struggle, not an oppressing class. Simultaneously however, a consideration of Freire’s arguments problematises peer mentoring.

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The first problem is that whilst peers do appear to offer a sense of mutuality or equity not present in more hierarchical, directive educational relationships, peer mentoring remains a space where people perform a more structured educational role than in non-structured peer relationships. There is a focus, for example, on ‘endorsing “healthy” norms, beliefs and behaviours… and challenging those who are “unhealthy”’ (UNODC, 2002), often as part of a broader criminal justice intervention (MoJ, 2011). The sense of mutuality is therefore undermined in both aim and context. The second problem is that peer mentoring carries an implicit expectation that mentees come to emulate their mentors. Whilst appearing to offer a more equal learning plane than traditional educational forms, peer mentoring nonetheless offers models for others to emulate and assumes that mentees require intervention by a superior other. In this case, the mentor is rendered superior by virtue of having mastered ‘going straight’, rather than a superior in terms of broader social status and resources. It therefore maintains a hierarchical approach to knowledge acquisition. Moreover, there is an obscure third party present within this hierarchy. Criminal justice peer mentoring does not exist independently of outside influence, but rather services are almost always required to seek some sort of funding for their work. To do so they often need to fit the agendas and targets of external funders, which may result in ‘drift’ from their original visions and missions of projects (Buck and Jaffe, 2011). This is a critique that has been recognised by Helen Colley in the context of contemporary youth mentoring settings where, ‘the practice of mentoring increasingly reflects class interests, particularly the intrusion of powerful political, institutional and business priorities into supposedly dyadic relationships’ (Colley, 2001: 179). Colley argues that there have been four distinct historical stages in the development of mentoring, which have shifted mentoring from ‘dominant groupings reproducing their own power, to subordinate groupings reproducing their own oppression’

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(Colley, 2002: 257). It is helpful to consider Colley’s analysis in detail in order to assess the context in which today’s peer mentoring emerges.

Colley considers mentoring in the context of classical pedagogical models. She argues that the first historical stage of mentoring (the Homeric stage) resided in mythology and involved ‘the (all) powerful [Greek God Athene] mentoring the powerful [King’s son Telemachus] to ensure the continuation of the nascent patriarchy and the suppression of matrilineal social forms’ (Colley, 2002: 264). Stage two (the Classical stage) is characterised by ‘quasi-parental’ relationships between exceptional individuals. It is ‘activity carried out by the powerful on behalf of the powerful, in order to preserve their dominant social status… Its essence is thus an intra-class and gendered reproductive function, the transmission of cultural capital’ (Colley, 2002: 264-5). Stage three (the Victorian stage) identifies middle class mentors befriending working class families in order to improve them by presenting a moral example. It is seen as ‘a direct instrument of domination of one class over another with the same essential goal of preserving the status of the ruling class’ (Colley, 2002: 266). The fourth and final (Modern) stage, ushered in by New Labour’s social exclusion agenda, has a moral aim. Goals of mentoring are employment related and indirect compulsion often features. For example:

Mentoring of this kind has become openly associated with the moral aim of altering the attitudes, beliefs, values and behaviour of the targeted group… in line with employment-related goals determined by welfare-to-work policies (Colley, 2002: 267).

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In terms of personnel, Colley argues, this work resembles the ‘weak mentoring the weak’ as non-professional staff, with less qualifications and training and lower pay mentor socially excluded people (Colley, 2002: 267-8).

If we reconsider peer mentoring in the light of Colley’s history, mentors become visible as non-professional (usually unpaid) staff undertaking emotionally demanding work with relatively powerless protégés, whilst subtly directed by the monies and missions of powerful stakeholders. In a criminal justice context much of the ‘power’ to spend monies and direct intervention ‘missions’ currently lies with State agencies. As the Coalition Government’s ‘Transforming Rehabilitation’ Strategy (2013) becomes a reality, however, it will be increasingly dispersed. Transforming Rehabilitation (MoJ, 2013) is a reform programme that aims to open up ‘the rehabilitation market’ to a diverse range of new providers. This includes forming 21 new Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs) made up of private and voluntary sector contractors. Despite claims for a mixed market, however, the majority of the prime contracts (the lead provider roles) for these new CRCs were awarded to large private corporations (MoJ, 2014). It is unclear, as yet, whether peer mentoring in such a context will offer ex-offenders an equitable voice within criminal justice practices, or whether it will merely become an affordable add-on, which replicates more established, ‘professionalised’, intervention methods such as case management and cognitive-based interventions. Given that, as discussed in chapter two, much of the drive, funding and enthusiasm for this practice is coming from the MoJ, which is correspondingly committed to the established approach of authoritative experts ‘punishing’ and ‘managing offenders’ (MoJ, 2010); the latter may well prove to be the case.

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The works of Freire and Colley allow us to unpack certain normative precepts about peer mentoring that appear in the extant literature, highlighting some real tensions inherent in peer mentoring as a pedagogical project, specifically, the unspoken power asymmetries created by pedagogical practice. Peer mentoring offers role models and aims to deposit information – thus resembling a banking concept of education; it also resembles a ‘weak mentoring the weak’ model, which may serve to perpetuate the oppression of subordinate groups. However, it is also a practice which strives to bring about reform and implies a commitment to critical dialogue: ‘[w]e work to provide ways that enable unheard voices; to make a difference, to urge policy-makers and people with power who make decisions to listen’ (User Voice, 2015). Peer mentoring is therefore currently engaged in a difficult balance between banking received, status quo knowledge and critically challenging received truths.

The first two precepts (Identity and Pedagogy) proposed here represent prevailing themes in current understandings of peer mentoring. They position mentoring as an intervention upon the individual, be it in order to influence identity shift or to teach new skills. Both of these underlying aims concur (in focus at least) with dominant discourses about criminality, that is, that ‘the offender’ is flawed and needs external intervention to bring them back into line with the ideals of social conformity. The next two principles that this chapter introduces represent less dominant, underlying themes within the claims for peer mentoring, but they are present nonetheless. The Fraternity or Sorority Precept and the

Politicisation Precept both actively challenge the assumption that the offender is an

individual who is lacking. These precepts suggest that peer mentoring is not simply concerned with individual change, but also social change and suggests it is a practice

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which aims to shape the social view of ‘offenders’ towards one that sees them as positive resources in their own right.