A chronopolitics of desistance: shadowing the resettlement journeys of 150 prison-leavers over 18 months

Thesis

This thesis examines desistance from crime as temporal work. The study maps the resettlement journeys of 150 men released from HMP Bullingdon, and enrolled in the ‘RESTART’ Thames Valley pilot, over 18 months. Through sequential interviews, go-along observation, and fieldnotes, the study follows men’s post-release journeys from prison to the community, as they attempt to stabilise lives shaped by scarcity, homelessness, addiction, and shifting support systems. The argument is simple: time is governed. Compressed licence periods, conditional housing contracts, and institutional clocks collide with the slow labour of change. The thesis develops a chronopolitical framework of desistance to capture how this misalignment fractures what counts as ‘progress’.

Four findings emerge from the data: First, institutional clocks across prison, probation, and housing compress post-release into short, fixed windows—licence milestones, curfews, reviews, and appointment cycles—that dictate pace and sequence, producing a stop–start rhythm that fragments support and continuity. Second, the same scaffold can stabilise or destabilise depending on sequence, tenure, and pace. Third, small, repeatable routines and relationships—often affective and unglamorous act as temporal anchors that hold time together yet remain largely unrecognised. Fourth, evaluation should align with lived time rather than institutional schedules, challenging accelerated ‘success’ markers that privilege speed and surface compliance over gradual work.

Theoretically and conceptually, the thesis intervenes in wider debates in desistance scholarship by showing how internal and structural mechanisms interact over time: the sequencing of intent and opportunity is not a single causal puzzle, but a recurring negotiation shaped by tempo, duration, alignment, and the meanings individuals attach to them. Methodologically, temporal coding, case-level alignment matrices, and mechanism memos render (mis)alignment visible across cases. Substantively, the thesis reframes resettlement as continuous temporal work sustained under scarcity and surveillance. When institutional clocks misread slow labour and misalign with lived change, the challenge is not merely to refine metrics but to rethink the relationship between measurement, meaning, and justice.

Authors: Kosc, H

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-0ozrpbrjk
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: prison-leavers; probation; desistance from crime; post-custodial life; prisoner re-entry; criminology; criminal justice policy & practice; rehabilitation; ethnography; resettlement; longitudinal research; qualitative
• Subjects: Justice; Public welfare; Rehabilitation; Criminology; Social justice; Public policy; Reparation (Criminal justice); Social policy; Prison sentences; Probation; Sociology