“They never asked why” : The lived experiences of education and its role in the transition from youth incarceration : adult male recidivist perspectives

In Australia in 2017/18, 61 percent of youth incarcerated in detention recidivated within six months of their release, and 80 percent in total were re-incarcerated within 12 months. Although there is an established relationship between educational attainment and youth crime, the extent to which engagement in education, particularly affective engagement, contributes to youth offender recidivism is yet fully to be understood. Affective engagement refers to a student’s “feelings, interests, perceptions, and attitudes toward school” (Achambault et al., 2009, p.654). Specifically falling under the category’s feelings, attitudes, perceptions, belonging, interests, perceived benefits and importance of education. This study employed a student engagement framework to explore the extent to which five young adult male prison inmates’ educational experiences may be associated with their criminal behaviour as youths, and their pathway to recidivism. Phenomenography is a qualitative research method with an interpretivist paradigm, that explores the different ways in which people experience something or think about something. The emphasis of research that applies phenomenography is on description (Marton, 1981; 1986). Phenomenography provided an effective qualitative framework in which to collect narrative data concerning participants’ lived experience of education, and these were analysed to reveal associations between their engagement in education and their recidivism. At the time of the study, all five participants were incarcerated in maximum-, medium- or minimum-security units at an Australian adult prison complex, and all had previously been incarcerated in their state’s youth detention centre. Interviews with each participant were conducted at the prison, and data collected through these were used to construct rich narratives, the contents of which were analysed through the student engagement lens. The study found that, on the whole, participants were affectively disengaged from education prior to their initial incarceration in a youth detention facility. It was further found that their disaffection before, during and after incarceration both generated and impacted on participants’ cognitive and behavioural disengagement from education. Moreover, a range of additional factors not directly causally related to their schooling were shown to have had a significant effect on their engagement in education. Additionally, none of the participants felt they were assisted in their transition back to education upon leaving youth detention, and all reported experiencing a strong sense of disconnection between agencies involved in this process. This, coupled with the lack of individualisation of transition processes, served to deteriorate their affective relationship with education, the justice system, and the state more generally. While it is difficult to pinpoint directly causal relations between school engagement and recidivism, there is a clear association between the participants’ disaffection from education, their experience of the educational dimensions of transition events, and their criminal behaviour. Moreover, their disaffection from education was not the sole factor impacting on their recidivism, and thus the education engagement model employed in this study only incompletely helped to explain a number of key causes of disengagement. Given established links between educational engagement and youth crime, these causes are closely associated with the participants’ recidivism. Additional factors identified in the findings therefore help to explain the extent to which inadequate attention to educational engagement during and between transitional events, particularly involving inter-agency relationships, results in diminished opportunities for successful transition. As such, the findings from this study could be used as a basis for additional research into educational engagement, effective transition processes, and inter-agency cooperation. More immediately, these findings could be used to inform approaches to support or challenge current policies, procedures and practices that pertain to education’s role in youth justice