both fine art pieces and production items: stained glass, fused and slumped glass, blown glass, carved wood items and handcrafted furniture. Money earned helps prisoners make reparations to victims and support their own families and there is a readymade mutual support structure and means of financial self sufficiency for members once they are released.
' Money earned helps prisoners make reparations to victims and support their own families '
Prisoner Social Cooperatives like these share some features with what in the UK are called ' social firms ' or Work Integration Social Enterprises( WISEs). But what they’ ve all got that most social firms or WISEs don’ t have, is democratic member control. Social Cooperatives are democratic organisations controlled by their members with equal voting rights. Prisoners co-own and cocontrol the cooperative together with the other stakeholder members – ex-prisoners, community members and criminal justice and social work professionals.
( Saluzzo prison micro brewery)
Democratic control
Democratic member control is of key importance because some of the latest research into what works in promoting desistance from crime emphasises the centrality of active and participative experiences of supervision – co-ownership of the rehabilitation process and co-production of community justice( Weaver 2011). To take full advantage of co-ownership of the process of desistance this research suggests:“ a more radical option might be to involve current and former service users in co-designing, co-developing, co-implementing and co-evaluating a desistancesupporting intervention process”( McNeill and Weaver 2010).
The point about social cooperatives is that they don’ t just provide a job. Democratic member control means they have the potential to help deliver such a desistance-supporting intervention process in which intervention is delivered and co-produced literally‘ on the job’. The Social cooperative can provide a structure in which the individual offender becomes an active and equal partner in his own rehabilitation through co-owning and co-controlling the intervention process through co-ownership and control of the cooperative. In this way prisoner-led social cooperatives could provide an ideal structure for delivering a co-produced desistance-supporting intervention process as well as providing the employment and other resettlement services required for successful desistance like they do in Italy today. They could potentially become an Offender Behaviour Programme in their own right and provide a model for“… how social and penal policy might become more orientated to generating, developing and sustaining the kinds of social capital
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