Desistance as temporal work: Following the resettlement journeys of 150 prison-leavers over 18 Months

As part of the Institute of Criminology's Lent term public seminar series, Helen Kosc spoke on 26 February 2026 on 'Desistance as temporal work: Following the resettlement journeys of 150 prison-leavers over 18 months'.

Dr. Helen Kosc is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge. She joins the Institute, having completed a Doctorate and master’s at the University of Oxford, Department of Sociology.

For her Doctoral research, Helen conducted an ethnographic study of the resettlement of 150 prison-leavers over 18 months, in partnership with the Ministry of Justice, HMPPS, and the Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner.

Helen was a coauthor in the latest Oxford Handbook of Evidence-Based Crime and Justice Policy, has worked in collaboration with Police Scotland, was a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, and serves on the Editorial Board of the practitioner-facing ‘Advancing Corrections’ Journal.

This research – which draws from the speaker’s Doctoral project and forthcoming book – 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 considers how time, timing and its misalignment might fracture what counts as ‘progress’ and to whom.

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. 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.

Catch up with the recording of the lecture here.