Profiles in Mentoring: Andrew Brierley on Peer Mentoring for Justice-Involved Individuals

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Andrew Brierley is the Senior Lecturer in Criminology, Investigation and Policing at Leeds Trinity University in the School of Social Sciences. Drawing on more than 15 years of experience in youth justice, his research examines desistance, lived experience in criminal justice, and the role of peer mentors in supporting identity change and reduced reoffending. We recently spoke with Brierley about his work on peer mentoring and desistance, featured here in The Chronicle of Evidence-Based Mentoring, where he explores how experiential knowledge can shape more humane and effective justice interventions.

The Chronicle (C): What personal or professional experiences first led you to focus your research on peer mentors and desistance, and how did those experiences shape the questions you brought to this review?

Andrew Brierley (AB): My interest in peer mentoring, lived experienced practice and desistance is rooted in both professional and personal experience. Before entering academia, I worked in youth justice for 15 years in the north of England after 4 periods of incarceration myself. I became increasingly aware that relationships built on shared experience often carried a different kind of credibility – one grounded not in credentials but in mutual recognition.

That experience shaped the core question behind the review: not simply whether peer mentoring “works,” but how and why it works for some individuals in justice settings. I was particularly interested in the relational mechanisms underpinning change – trust, legitimacy, identification, and hope – because these are often discussed rhetorically in policy but rarely examined conceptually in research. The systematic review became an opportunity to step back from anecdote and examine the international evidence base more rigorously.

C: As you synthesized studies across different countries and justice settings, what most surprised you about how peer mentoring is actually defined and practiced on the ground?

AB: What surprised me most was the degree of conceptual inconsistency – and the limited attention to recidivism as a clear evaluative metric in many studies. Across countries and settings, “peer mentoring” was defined in dramatically different ways. In some contexts, “peer” meant shared incarceration experience; in others, it referred more loosely to age, background, experience of exploitation, addiction or community identity. Training, role clarity, boundaries, and organisational support varied widely across studies.

Despite this inconsistency, one pattern was remarkably consistent: mentoring appeared most effective when shared lived experience generated credibility and relational trust. Yet these mechanisms were often implied rather than theorised.
This gap between rhetorical enthusiasm and conceptual clarity was one of the strongest motivations for developing clearer theoretical tools in my later work. An autoethnographic publication is available in the Incarceration Journal (Desistance habitus: Strategically Using experience in practice – Andi Brierley, David Best, 2025), with another empirical currently under review.

C: Your analysis introduces concepts such as street and carceral capital and growth reciprocity; how do these ideas change the way policymakers and practitioners should think about lived experience as a form of expertise?

AB: The concepts of street capital and carceral capital help reframe lived experience not as a biographical fact, but as a form of embodied knowledge that can function as expertise within specific social fields. These forms of capital – fluency in street norms, prison hierarchies, informal codes, and survival strategies – are typically devalued within formal institutions and professional practice frameworks. However, in peer mentoring relationships, they can be converted into symbolic capital: credibility, authenticity, and legitimacy in the eyes of mentees. Growth reciprocity further challenges one-directional models of mentoring. The evidence suggests that mentoring relationships often benefit both parties. Supporting others can reinforce mentors’ own desistance, identity reconstruction, hope for the future and sense of purpose – all of which I understood through experience. Collectively, these findings suggest that policymakers should move beyond viewing lived experience as a nice addition to services. Instead, it should be understood as a relational and social resource that requires proper support, training, and recognition – rather than being instrumentalised or tokenised. At the same time, lived experience roles can function as legitimising mechanisms within penal systems, which makes it even more important that their complexity is critically examined rather than romanticised.

Read Dr. Brierley’s full paper here