The challenge of working with racially motivated offenders: An exercise in ambivalence?

A Probation Circular published in 2005 announced that accredited one-to-one programmes should be developed for Racially Motivated Offenders (RMOs). This article reviews a number of existing literatures written by both practitioners and academics which have focused on the problems and opportunities that arise during interventions with RMOs. At the same time, in this article, insights derived from the latter literatures are contextualized within poststructuralist and discursive psychological literatures. The outcome of this is an attempt to forge common ground between practitioner-derived insights on racism, racists, identity, locality and shared ‘communities of prejudice’ with poststructuralist approaches to identity and the advancement of specific therapeutic/correctionalist techniques (especially the motivational interviewing technique pioneered by Miller and Rollnick, 1991) for facilitating change processes in RMOs.