Righting recidivism: unlocking the cognitive underpinnings of successful interventions to reduce reoffending

Recidivism is one of the greatest socio-economic burdens the UK currently faces. At an estimated total cost of £18.1 billion a year, prison re-entry places a substantial burden on the national economy. This exacerbates reoffending's associated societal costs, including deviance, unstable communities and displacement.

There is a 48% chance that an offender will go on to re-offend within a 12-month period, worsening the current prison overcrowding crisis, which is associated with severe mental health issues and a spread in infectious diseases. Re-offending rates are currently stable in the UK, providing an ideal time to conduct research into reducing them and the burden they place on the economy and wider civil society.

We already know that powerful group identities lead people to enact extraordinary behaviours for their groups - from hardcore football fans travelling the globe for a game to gang members committing atrocities against their rivals. Can this problem be turned on its head to provide a solution? Can group passion be harnessed for the social good?

More specifically, how can we foster positive social identities that are powerful enough to re-write offenders' self-narratives? I will apply the theoretical framework of 'identity fusion' - an intense, lasting form of social bonding - to prison populations. For the first time, this research integrates literatures on fusion to sports identities (as a catalyst for reform), shared experiences, women's roles in offending communities as well as men's, and approaches to intervention implementation.

The proposed seven-year research project crosses disciplines and methodologies, and has secured support from major non-academic partners to address these questions, including the MoJ, HMPPS and the Twinning Project - a nationwide intervention that pairs major football clubs with prisons and gives football-industry training and sustainable social identities to prisoners. Primarily informed by anthropology, psychology and criminology, the project will create novel tools using cross-cultural practices, which can be applied nationwide to affect positive, viable societal change.

This research is further supported by two postdoctoral researchers, a core team of carefully selected mentors, and five additional UK and international collaborators.

Crucially, I focus on women within this framework - as pivotal actors within both the justice system and the communities that receive ex-offenders - though they are much neglected in both the literatures on identity fusion and re-offending. Despite representing just 5% of offenders, women account for a disproportionately high cost to the criminal justice system: policing females alone is estimated at £1bn a year.

Nonetheless, they are also a particularly vulnerable population: 60% will have experienced domestic violence, around 25% have dependent children, and many of them self-harm (five times as many as men).

As a recognised expert on social bonding and violence among football fans, I will draw upon my theoretical and applied knowledge to analyse existing interventions, design a toolkit for future interventions, and implement the researched practices in particularly vulnerable and critical populations (e.g. female and young offenders). This project will afford me recognition as a world leader in my field and help to grow a team of inter-disciplinary researchers, united by a passion to tackle reoffending.