When people leave prison, the first days and weeks after release are often described as a fresh start. But new research by Dr Helen Kosc suggests that, for many prison-leavers, release is not experienced as a clean break from custody. Instead, it is a compressed and often unforgiving period of appointments, deadlines, conditions, delays and uncertainty.
Kosc, who joins the Institute as Assistant Professor in January, recently completed a DPhil in Sociology at the University of Oxford. Her research followed the resettlement journeys of 150 men released from HMP Bullingdon over an 18-month period, all of whom were enrolled in the RESTART Thames Valley pilot programme.
The project was based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, including interviews before, during and after release, go-along observation, and time spent alongside frontline resettlement workers. Kosc followed men from prison wings to the gate, to probation appointments, housing offices, job centres, GP registrations, pharmacies, banks, hostels, pavements, sofas and, for some, back into custody.
Her central argument is that desistance — the process of moving away from crime — cannot be understood only through individual motivation or access to support. It must also be understood through time.
“People often ask whether desistance is caused by internal factors, like motivation and identity, or external factors, like housing, work and relationships,” Kosc explains. “My research shows that the timing and sequencing of these things matters just as much. A resource can help if it arrives at the right moment. But if it arrives too late, too early, or in the wrong order, it can fail to support change at all.”
The thesis develops what Kosc calls a 'chronopolitics of desistance': a way of understanding how institutions govern change through licence periods, appointment schedules, housing contracts, curfews, benefit delays and probation reviews. These timelines shape what prison-leavers are able to do, when they are able to do it, and how their progress is judged.
One of the study’s key findings is that the same form of support can either stabilise or destabilise depending on when and how it arrives. Housing, for example, can provide a crucial scaffold. But if it is temporary, unsafe, heavily surveilled, or poorly timed with other needs, it may also produce new forms of pressure. Similarly, employment may be treated as a marker of success, but a job offer is difficult to take up without secure accommodation, transport, identification, sobriety, or a basic sense of stability.
Kosc’s research also challenges conventional ways of measuring success. Criminal justice agencies often assess progress through visible benchmarks: attending appointments, avoiding breach, sustaining accommodation, entering work, or completing programmes. But participants frequently described success in quieter more precarious terms: getting through the day, resisting relapse, maintaining routines, rebuilding relationships or staying away from harmful situations.
“The biggest difference I found was between how desistance is evaluated and how it is lived,” Kosc says. “For institutions, progress is often measured through compliance with fixed milestones. But for the men I followed, progress was often much slower, more fragile and made up of small, repeated acts that are difficult to count.” Yet these “small, repeated acts” often go unrecognised. The emotional labour involved in resettlement — managing boredom, shame, cravings, disappointment, fear, hope and fatigue — rarely appears in official assessments. As a result, some of the labour most central to desistance is also the least visible to the systems tasked with measuring it.
The findings have implications for probation, resettlement services and wider criminal justice policy. Kosc argues that institutions should pay closer attention not only to what support is offered, but to when it is offered, how long it lasts, what conditions are attached to it, and whether it aligns with the lived pace of change. Rather than asking only “what works?”, the research suggests a different set of questions: when does support work, for whom, in what sequence, and according to whose definition of success? Understanding change as temporal work, Kosc argues, may help institutions better recognise the realities of life after prison and design systems that support, rather than undermine, fragile progress.
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Dr Helen Kosc joined the Institute in January 2026 as an Assistant Professor, having recently completed a DPhil in the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford. Kosc will be taking over the majority of Professor Ben Crewe’s teaching and supervision on the MPhil and MSt courses, while Crewe is on sabbatical for a Leverhulme Research Fellowship.
Kosc’s Public Seminar at the Institute (February 2026) is available to watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2OhfMZAai8