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Book Review: C Knight, Emotional Literacy in Criminal Justice: Professional Practice with Offenders

To this observer, our society’s recent collective experience of crime seems filled with new heights of emotion. Offences such as the murder of Lee Rigby, the abuse perpetrated by Jimmy Saville and the 2011 London riots have led to outpourings of emotion – anger, fear, disgust – and these responses perhaps signal a shift towards a renewed culture of what Bottoms calls ‘popular punitiveness’ (Bottoms, 1995). The government strives to appear ever ‘tougher’ on crime to appease this ‘public’: lights out at 10pm for young offenders, a ban on books sent to prisons, an ongoing legal challenge about the right of prisoners to vote. In this climate, a book that rigorously explores the place and value of emotion in working with offenders, the relationship between worker and service user to increase motivation and achieve positive change, underpinned by a clear framework of human rights and a commitment to a values-based practice, is extremely welcome. Knight argues the case for the efficacy of emotional intelligence – uncovering and using positive emotions – in the rehabilitation of offenders, and in the development of effective practice by professionals. In doing so, she draws on research undertaken with practitioners, and creates a clear evidence-base for the benefits of such an approach. This is a timely contribution; the importance of emotional literacy has been previously explored in social work (Howe, 2008), and perhaps this development has been slower in the field of criminal justice because there emotion itself is highly contested ground. Knight explores the historic drive towards rationality and logic in the criminal justice system, and the exclusion of emotion as a force that could cloud the due process of the law (Karstedt et al., 2011). The emergence of rationality as the dominant discourse in work with offenders was no doubt a response to the danger of a system motivated by negative emotions of revenge, fear and anger (p. 19). However, Knight highlights the tension created for practitioners by the ‘dichotomy between the presentation of criminal justice as an emotion-free zone and the reality for practitioners, offenders, victims and witnesses within the system’ (p. 2) – a reality experienced as emotional. One senses Knight is seeking a model that resolves this tension in a balance between cognition and emotion, and the relevance of this model of emotional literacy lies in its ability to mitigate against both the risk posed by the dominance of scientific rigour to the exclusion of humanity, and the supremacy of emotion that interferes with fact. In the harnessing of 561148 EJP0010.1177/2066220314561148Book ReviewBook Reviews 2014