Considering the value of combat-sport participation in supporting desistance for electronic monitoring users: a synergist for reform or criminogenic catalyst?

• In Event: School, sports and crime prevention

Abstract

Criminal justice sanctions, like electronic monitoring (EM) tags, are linked with promoting desistance from crime. Nevertheless, research indicates that without associated rehabilitative components, their impact is often limited. Simultaneously, interventions using combat sports that are intended to promote desistance have gained increasing interest within criminology; however, research on them is limited while critics discuss their capacity to potentially worsen offending. This chapter considers research conducted on a sample of EM users who continued/restarted/began combat sports training while serving various EM tag sentences, taken from an ethnographic study conducted between 2014 and 2020 in England and Wales. It highlights how combat sports participation, often undertaken recreationally as a form of leisure, has a complicated relationship with desistance for these offenders: in some cases, leading to a significant reduction in crime but making little difference for others. Consequently, it asks whether participation in combat sports can be integrated into probation programmes to help promote the cessation of offending and how its potential to intensify it be avoided.

Author

• Carl Berry, UWE