The 2025 Howard League Lecture, held in memory of Lord Parmoor

Fergus McNeill, Professor of Criminology and Social Work at the University of Glasgow and former Chair of the Howard League, gave this year’s Howard League Lecture, with the title ‘Rehabilitation and Penal Reform’.  

The Howard League Lecture is held annually in memory of Lord Parmoor, Milo Cripps, a supporter and major donor to the charity.  

This event was generously hosted by Mishcon de Reya. A transcript and slides from Professor McNeill’s lecture can be found below. 

I didn’t set out to spend most of the last 40 years engaged in one way or another with rehabilitation. At the age of 20, which for the record was 38 years ago, armed only with a degree in philosophy and history, and with no idea what I wanted to do with it or my life, I was placed in a drug rehab by a volunteer agency. It was meant to be a kind of post-Uni gap year. This is a picture of me almost three years later, on my last day there, having been through the ceremonial ritual of being thrown in the pond by the residents I had lived and worked alongside.

I wouldn’t be here today – I wouldn’t have become a social worker and then a criminologist – I certainly wouldn’t have had the great privilege of chairing the Board of the Howard League for the last six years — if I hadn’t met and learned from and alongside these men and the other people I met in that time. In an important sense, they set me on this path; they formed what was to become my obsession.

Nonetheless, as this lecture has approached, I’ve felt a degree of trepidation and awkwardness about my choice of topic. Given the current state of our penal system, to speak about rehabilitation feels almost self-indulgent, if not downright irrelevant.

The Justice Committee’s (2025: 1) very recent report presents a very bleak assessment indeed of rehabilitation in the prisons of England and Wales today. Here are just some of the ‘lowlights’:

‘…current conditions across the prison estate are not conducive to rehabilitation. Overcrowding has led to arbitrary prisoner transfers, disrupted sentence progression, and reduced access to purposeful activity, education, and family contact’ (p1)

‘The prison estate is in a state of disrepair. Dilapidated buildings and broken infrastructure limit access to rehabilitative spaces and contribute to poor mental health’ (p2).

‘Many prisoners are locked up for 22 hours or more each day, with limited access to fresh air, showers, or rehabilitative activities… Purposeful activity, including education, work, and offending behaviour programmes, is central to rehabilitation, yet it is inconsistently delivered and often deprioritised’ (p2).

‘Prison education is underfunded and poorly delivered. Participation rates are low, Ofsted ratings remain poor, and neurodivergent prisoners are not adequately supported. Education on the youth estate is also in a state of decline’ (p2).

‘Health and wellbeing services are failing to meet the needs of prisoners. Mental health support is inconsistent, and operational pressures prevent timely access to care. Women in prison face acute and complex health needs, yet the system is failing to provide even basic support’ (p2).

We’ll hear more from the Committee in due course about rehabilitation and resettlement in the community. Given the careless vandalism to which probation services have been subjected in the last decade or two, I’m not sure we can expect better news in their next report.

In this context, it’s not surprising that some very distinguished critical commentators, like Pat Carlen (2013), have argued that rehabilitation is now nothing more than an ‘imaginary’; a fiction and a fig-leaf that tries but fails to cover-up the indecency of our current systems and practices. Of course, even if that is a valid critique of the current state of affairs, it leaves open the twin questions of whether rehabilitation could be revived and whether it should be.

Whatever its travails, rehabilitation remains one of the most important and commonly used terms in the modern history of criminal justice. Yet, both ‘the rehabilitative ideal’ itself and whether and how it should be made real in the practices of both prison and probation services are profoundly and perennially contested in theory, policy and practice, and in the public sphere. To assess where rehabilitation might fit in the project of penal reform therefore is not straightforward, since scholars from different disciplines (including criminology, history, law, philosophy, psychology, sociology, social policy and social work) conceive and discuss rehabilitation in different ways and so they assess its merits and demerits quite differently.

To get a grip on this relationship, I aim in this lecture to synthesise some of these diverse perspectives. I’ll begin by discussing how rehabilitation has been defined and debated in the context of penal theory (drawing also on its history). Second, I’ll turn to how rehabilitation relates to key policy challenges and international standards. Third, I’ll offer a very brief account of contemporary models of rehabilitation (advocated by psychologists and criminologists). But note that in all three of these parts of the talk, I’ll be discussing penal ideals not realities.  So, in the fourth part of the talk, I’ll summarise emerging sociologies of rehabilitation that describe and analyse how it is constructed in practice and experienced by those at its sharp end. Drawing these disciplinary strands together, I’ll move towards what must be, for now, a provisional conclusion by explaining the need for better comparative research on rehabilitation. That, I’ll argue is what we need to help us answer the question of whether rehabilitation is a help or a hindrance to penal reform.

Rehabilitation as a penal ideal

Philosophers of punishment and legal theorists discuss and debate rehabilitation as an important normative justification of punishment (Tonry, 2006), one that still commands considerable public support (Maruna and King, 2008). Nonetheless, rehabilitation – at least in criminal justice contexts – is not easy to define. Raynor and Robinson (2009) note that, even in academic texts, two different objectives are often conflated or confused. The first concerns reducing offending by somehow changing the disposition of the person who has offended; the second concerns securing reintegration into society by somehow changing the social status and position of people who have been punished. While these two objectives are linked, they entail quite different relationships between punishment and rehabilitation; in the first, rehabilitation shapes the nature of punishment; in the second, rehabilitation comes after punishment.

Connecting rehabilitation with post-punishment reintegration is a longstanding continental European tradition. Indeed, the earliest use of the term, according to Raynor and Robinson (2009), was in late 17^th century France where it referred to the undoing of a criminal conviction, i.e., to the deletion or expunging of the criminal record. A century or so later, Beccaria (1764/1963) reflected a similar meaning of the term in arguing for approaches to punishment focused on ‘requalifying individuals as… juridical subjects’. Thus, rehabilitation in Europe was first seen as both as the proper goal of punishment and as an important means by which it might be brought to an end, as even retributive notions of justice require.

While these ideas remain important in European law and practice (van Zyl Smit and Snacken, 2009), in English-speaking countries, rehabilitation has been more commonly associated with notions of individual treatment and ‘correction’ (cf. Rotman, 1994). Having developed rapidly in the 20^th century, along with the social sciences, the ‘psy’ disciplines and social work, this version of ‘the rehabilitative ideal’ suffered a crisis in the 1970s and 80s (Allen, 1981), particularly in the USA and the UK.

Bottoms (1980) summed up the critique as follows: rehabilitation misconstrued the causes of crime as individual when they were coming to be understood as social and structural. It also failed to recognise how crime itself is socially constructed via  criminalisation as a social process. At the same time, rehabilitative practices had begun to be exposed as being systematically discriminatory, targeting coercive interventions on the most poor and disadvantaged people in society (cf. Carlen, 2013). Rehabilitation’s interference with personal autonomy was increasingly seen as being inconsistent with respect for individual liberties and human rights, particularly in its supposed attempts to (psychologically and legally) coerce change, as was vividly depicted in Anthony Burgess’s book (and Stanley Kubrick’s later controversial film) ‘A Clockwork Orange’. Finally, and critically, the empirical evidence at that time seemed to suggest that, despite its scientific pretensions, rehabilitation did not work (Martinson, 1974).

Powerful though it was, this critique had its limitations. Crucially, from the 1980s onwards, evidence about ‘what works’ played a vital role in challenging pessimism about rehabilitation’s effectiveness. Around the same time, a brief flurry of writing about new normative or philosophical approaches to rehabilitation sought to address other criticisms. The ‘new rehabilitationists’ (see Lewis, 2005), for example, proposed four principles to guide ‘rights-based rehabilitation’: the assertion of the duty of the State to provide for rehabilitation; the establishment of proportional limits on the intrusions imposed; maximising choice and voluntarism in the process; and committing to using prison as a last resort.

Rethinking rehabilitation within the framework of his theory of communicative punishment, the philosopher Anthony Duff (2003, 2005) advanced the idea of rehabilitation not as correctional treatment but as a means of repairing relational breaches between the offender, the victim and the community. More recently, du Bois-Pedain (2017) has argued that reintegration is punishment’s core social function: ‘punishment does not merely mark out the punishee’s actions as wrong and blame him for engaging in this wrongful act. It also defines how both punishee and punisher will move forward from here… there is reintegrative momentum inherent in punishment’ (du Bois-Pedain 2017: 203, emphasis added).

Whatever your preferred approach to punishment, the importance of generating ‘reintegrative momentum’ seems undeniable. Unless we intend to kill, disable, exile, or permanently imprison people who have offended, we must be concerned with the question of their social reintegration, both as a matter of justice (in bringing punishment to its proper end) and as a matter of crime reduction. One important and relatively novel way to conceptualise rehabilitation then is to see it as referring to processes and practices that seek to generate this reintegrative momentum.

Policy challenges and international standards

When I asked to review the evidence about how criminal justice systems might better reduce reoffending in an address to the United Nations most recent Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice in 2021 (McNeill, 2021), I argued that this also required these systems to enable reintegration.

Reoffending is certainly a pressing challenge for governments and societies around the world. As the Justice Committee (2025) noted 80% of all offending in England and Wales is reoffending and the costs are huge. One estimate (from 2016) put the financial costs of reoffending by people who had already been subject to criminal sanctions[1] at £15.6billion per annum.

The costs of high rates of reoffending are not just economic. Behind these statistics, there are citizens, families, groups and businesses suffering crime victimization; and very often, it is those who are already disadvantaged in a variety of other ways that suffer repeated victimization. Since the protection of citizens – and especially vulnerable citizens – is a key duty of the state, the failure to protect is also a political problem; indeed, it strikes at the legitimacy of the state itself.

If a punished person goes on to reoffend, then their punishment has failed in an important sense; and this presents a problem for all of us — whether offender, victim, community or state. Yet in many contemporary states, the paradoxical reaction to punishment’s failure has been to do more of the same; imposing even more punishment and more control and restriction on those who have offended.

As international bodies like the United Nations and the Council of Europe have long recognized, expanding penal systems carries its own costs and risks. Not only is it fiscally expensive, often it comes into conflict with international standards in relation to human rights; tending to worsen the dis-integration and social disadvantage that, typically, has already been experienced by those who find their way into prison. Punitive responses to crime tend to reduce the prospects of both positive personal change and of social reintegration – thus fueling the vicious cycle of reoffending. In consequence, social stability and solidarity are weakened, and with them, so are the prospects for collective flourishing which are reflected in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (especially SDG16). In this sense, therefore, reintegration is a key challenge for sustainability – and getting reintegration right is key to criminal justice’s contribution to that wider goal. Both the UN’s Mandela Rules and the Tokyo Rules reflect this key aspiration – to move away from merely punitive and towards rehabilitative and reintegrative approaches, both in prisons and in the community.

Contemporary models of rehabilitation

Some researchers – often working at the interface between forensic psychology and criminology — argue that the way out of this trap is to get better at rehabilitation. According to a very recent review of 53 meta-analyses (Koehler and Lösel, 2024), certain kinds of rehabilitative interventions, both in prisons and in community settings, can and do support reductions in reconviction rates. The question of ‘how’ is more complex. There has been much debate about the relative merits of two models — the ‘Risks-Needs-Responsivity’ (RNR) model and the ‘Good Lives Model’ (GLM) (see, respectively Ziv [2020] and Purvis and Ward [2020] for overviews), much of it preoccupied with evidencing the effectiveness of the ‘offending behaviour programmes’ these models promote.

More recently, research has also stressed the critical importance of the skills required to enable staff to develop constructive relationships with those they seek to help, to model pro-social behaviour, to act as brokers for the other services their supervisees need. Those supervised and supported by more highly-skilled staff tend to have lower reconviction rates that those supervised by less skilled staff (see Chadwick, Serin and Lloyd, 2020; Haas and Smith 2020; Trotter, 2020). The focus on skills helpfully broadens thinking both about the mechanisms and processes of rehabilitation — from programmes to practitioners — and, to a certain extent, about its aspirations: Whereas, the RNR model does not aim ultimately at reintegration, settling for securing reductions in reoffending, the GLM model and skills-based approaches tend to include work around social integration.

Criminology’s contribution – and, within it, my own – has been to develop and apply a different kind of evidence base about how and why almost all people – even the most persistent offenders — stop offending. Drawing on empirical research using a wide range of methods, ‘desistance’ theories seek to describe and explain this process of change in and of itself. Desistance from crime can and often does occur without any rehabilitative intervention (Graham and McNeill 2017; see also McNeill and Graham, 2020). Nonetheless, better understanding the process can help us design better rehabilitative supports and services. That is why so much of my work over the last 25 years has focused on using desistance research to reform and challenge penal practices (see McNeill, 2006, McNeill, et al., 2012; McNeill, 2015; Burke et al., 2018; 2023). Most recently, by connecting conceptual and empirical work on desistance and on reintegration, I have argued that securing desistance typically requires that people find belonging, but that there are myriad obstacles that lie in their way (McNeill and Schinkel, 2024).

Over the last 15 years, I have tried to draw all these interdisciplinary strands together – paying attention to both normative and empirical work – in order to develop a clearer and more comprehensive model of rehabilitation, one that helps to elaborate the range of ways in which reintegrative momentum might be generated and, thereby, to suggest how rehabilitation should be imagined and pursued within penal systems[2]. The resulting ‘four forms of rehabilitation’ model (McNeill, 2012; 2014) became quite influential, I think, both in scholarly and in professional debates. Personal rehabilitation refers to any activity that focuses on enabling changes within the individual to support desistance from offending. This might include, for example, not just ‘offending behaviour programmes’ but also vocational training, education, health-related interventions, engagement with the arts or with sports, etc. Judicial or legal rehabilitation concerns when, how and to what extent a person’s full citizenship rights are formally restored; a key step in enabling social participation, including within the labour market. Moral and political rehabilitation concerns the re-mediation of the person’s civic relationships with the victim/s of their offence and with their wider community. Importantly, it also relates to the reintegration-related duties of the punishing state and of civil society. Finally, even where personal development has been achieved, where legal requalification is confirmed and where moral obligations around redress and reparation are settled, the question of social rehabilitation remains: This relates to informal social recognition and acceptance of the returning citizen by others.

These forms of rehabilitation are most often interdependent, so criminal justice systems therefore need to attend to all of them. I’ve argued that the goal of rehabilitation needs to be not just reducing reoffending but rather enabling reintegration, both as a matter of justice and human rights and as a means of crime reduction. The model has already been used as a framework for critically analysing and constructively reimagining probation systems (Burke, et al. 2018) and practices (Burke, et al., 2022) in England and Wales, and to compare punishment and rehabilitation regimes for men convicted of sexual offences in England and Wales and in Norway (Ievins and Mjåland, 2021).

A few years ago, working under my supervision of his doctoral research, Rubio Arnal (2021) developed the four forms model further, adding ‘material rehabilitation’ (that is, the provision of material resources necessary for reintegration; cf. Verweij, et al., 2021) and separating moral from ‘civic-political rehabilitation’. The latter refers to participation in the civic and political life of the polity, for example through volunteering and through voting. Hence, we now discuss and promote the 6-form model of rehabilitation you see here (Rubio Arnal and McNeill, 2024).

Sociologies of Rehabilitation

However, a more philosophically-informed and evidence-based understanding of what rehabilitation should involve, tells us nothing about what rehabilitation is in practice, and as a ‘lived experience’. Even setting aside the reports of Parliamentary Committees and Prison and Probation Inspectorates, sociological accounts of contemporary rehabilitation’s everyday realities paint a concerning picture.

Sociologists of punishment argue that decline of poet-war collectivism and welfarism, and the preoccupation with risk associated with late modernity (Bauman, 1997, 2000), meant that rehabilitation’s traditional justification – as a means of reclaiming or helping disadvantaged people – lost its cultural purchase (Garland, 2001). According to Robinson (2008), to survive these changes, rehabilitation was transformed and re-marketed to appeal to three late-modern penal narratives: utilitarian, managerial and expressive. Hence, as well as protecting the public (rather than rescuing the ‘offender’), rehabilitation promised to deliver an efficient return on public investment, and to express condemnation and censure as part of its project of ‘correction’. The related shift from seeing the ‘offender’ as a human subject in rehabilitation to constructing them as a mere object of rehabilitation echoes the earlier critiques of the rehabilitative ideal in the 1970s and 80s, suggesting threats to human rights and new prospects of abuses of penal power.

However, as Goodman, Phelps and Page (2017) later argued, differently situated actors with different types and amounts of capital endlessly contest the nature of criminal justice. To understand penal change then, we must understand how distal social forces and proximate shifts in the penal field are manipulated and managed by those local penal actors who struggle to construct criminal justice in law, policy and practice.To understand contemporary rehabilitation therefore, we need to understand how it is contested all the way down (McNeill, 2018: 38-40); not just in the ivory towers, the corridors of power, and in the crucible of public debate, but also in prison halls, treatment rooms, classrooms and workshops, in both the front and the back offices of probation services, in NGOs and third sector organisations, and in businesses and communities.

Equally, seeking to understand how rehabilitation is experienced by those subject to it leads us to the recent revival (and expansion) of ethnographic approaches to the study of punishment. Most directly pertinent here is a developing body of work about the ‘pains of rehabilitation’ in its late-modern risk-focused forms. Thus, for example, there is growing evidence about how prisoners suffer the ‘soft power’ of prison psychologists and others involved in key decisions about rehabilitation and reintegration (Crewe, 2009; Warr, 2023). A range of studies across different countries have exposed ways in which both people in prison and people on probation or parole feel compelled to contort their perceptions and presentations of self in line with the requirements of the rehabilitative programmes or processes to which they are subject (cf. Lacombe, 2008; Cox, 2012; Digard, 2010, 2014; Durnescu, 2011; Hayes, 2015; Ugelvik, 2014; Warr, 2020a, 2020b, 2021; Werth 2011, 2013, 2016, 2023).

In recent work on supervision in the community (McNeill, 2018) and on post-prison reintegration (Crockett Thomas, et al., 2021; McNeill et al, 2023), I have worked with others within and beyond the academy to develop and employ new creative methodologies that have helped both to better understand and represent people’s lived experiences of these processes. Using creative methods in ethnographic research has powerfully exposed ways in which rehabilitative services can and do sometimes help people towards desistance and reintegration, but also often leave people feeling significantly constrained, misjudged and misrecognised, treated like waste and/or left in limbo (Fitzgibbon, et al., 2017). In a recent paper, I go further, exploring when rehabilitation itself becomes a form of state violence and when, conversely it enables violence reduction (both by the rehabilitated individual and by the rehabilitating state)(McNeill, 2023). My conclusion is that, to function as a legitimate and effective form of violence reduction, rehabilitative systems, technologies and practices must work through moral recognition of and dialogue with their subjects.

Comparative penology, rehabilitation and penal reform (or abolition)

This, of course, begs the crucial question, is rehabilitation doing good anywhere and any of the time? And that is the question that has latterly forced me to imagine and design a comparative study of rehabilitation and reintegration.

Despite its many conceptual and methodological challenges, the case for comparative penology is clear. As Nils Christie (2004: 101) argued: ‘Penal systems carry deep meanings. They convey information on central features of the states they represent.’ He also recognised the need to look at the full range of penal practices in order to assess the character of the state. My own book on penal forms of supervision and their proliferation and pervasiveness (McNeill, 2018) underlined the importance of examining not just the most severe or repressive features of penal systems, but also practices too commonly assumed to be more progressive or benign. Sometimes states do a great deal of harm when they think they are doing good, not least by expanding the scale, reach and intensity of penal control in the name of rehabilitation and reintegration. This is why it seemed to me that a comparative study of rehabilitation in three ‘progressive’ states was so necessary.

Within wider debates about ‘Nordic exceptionalism’ (Ugelvik and Dullum, 2012; Smith and Ugelvik, 2017), Norway has often been cast both as a less punitive social democracy and as an archetype of a generous ‘welfarist’ state (sometimes referred to as ‘Big Mother’). It is renowned both for its low imprisonment rate and for its commitment to the principle of ‘normality’ (making life inside as much like ‘normal’ life outside as possible) and to the ‘import model’ (bringing public services into prisons). Norway’s correctional services have also been seen as leaders in both social-scientific and technological innovation in prisons and in probation. However, scholars have also argued that there may be a dark side to Norway’s penal welfarism. When ambitious state projects are combined with a culture of intervention, the result may be paternalism: Big Mother’s embrace may feel warm and benign, but also oppressive and illiberal. Recent analyses suggest that Norway’s criminal justice system combines a hands-off/laissez-faire approach in some cases with a strong interventionist rehabilitation approach in others (Ievins and Mjåland 2021; Mjåland and Ugelvik, 2025, forthcoming).

Until recently, the Netherlands has also been celebrated as an exceptionally tolerant, liberal and progressive society (Downes, 1988); one that lays claim to the oldest probation services in the world (established in 1823), services which are sometimes seen as being at the cutting edge of evidence-based rehabilitation, and of the development of new technologies (Boone, 2015; Boone, Bosker, Doekhie, 2024; Wermink, et al., 2010). Although contemporary political rhetoric and legal changes have been characterized by a focus on law and order (Downes & Van Swaaningen, 2007; Boone, Pakes & Van Wingerden, 2022), criminal justice organizations are still very much oriented around rehabilitation. However, here too, rehabilitation has taken on a more instrumental character; framed as a means to secure society and reduce recidivism rates (Boone & Van Swaaningen, 2013, Boone, 2015).

The supposed distinctiveness of Scotland (within the UK) is said to rest in its enduring commitment to rehabilitation and to a more welfarist and solidaristic approach to people who have offended (McAra, 2005; 2008). It has also been at the forefront of international developments around new approaches to rehabilitation informed by desistance research discussed above (McNeill, 2015). Yet, unlike the Netherlands and Norway, Scotland has one of the largest correctional populations in Europe, both in prisons and in the community. Recent research has suggested that enduring policy commitments to both penal reductionism and rehabilitation have tended to conceal rather than diminish both the pains of imprisonment (Brangan, 2019; 2021) and those of supervision (McNeill, 2018). Hunter, Tripkovic and McNeill (2023) have also argued, reviewing Scotland’s approach to prisoner disenfranchisement (in other words, their exclusion from voting in elections and referenda), that there are important contradictions within Scotland’s commitments to rehabilitation and reintegration, and within Scottish penal welfarism.

In my career so far, I’ve been fortunate to have had very many opportunities to engage with people who share my interests, but who see them from quite different positions and places. So, I’ve had good reason to reflect on what can be learned both from hosting visitors who ask difficult questions, and from being the one asking the tricky questions of trusted local guides. In these contexts I sometimes quote, Robert Burns, who clearly understood what the travels and travails of comparative dialogue had to offer:

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us,
An’ foolish notion:
What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us,
An’ ev’n devotion!

[in the original Scots]

Burns’ observation mirrors Zygmunt Bauman’s (2011: 171) view of the twin roles of sociologists as ‘defamiliarizing the familiar and familiarizing […] the unfamiliar’.

In this vein, in the project I’m about to begin with colleagues and friends in Leiden and Oslo, we will develop a new approach and method, which we’ve called Dialogical Comparative Penology (DCP).

That basically means involving some of our project’s participants in dialogues within which they make the inter-country comparisons with one another and with us. DCP has a critical role to play in helping to make the penal ideas, customs, habits and practices that we take for granted ‘strange’ as we show them to others and see them through their unfamiliar eyes. To do so can help puncture complacency about how progressive, fair or evidence-based our penal approaches may be. This kind of humbling is especially important when we think we are doing good and when we think we are doing comparatively well.

Since the 6-forms model of rehabilitation (discussed above) was developed both through my comparative work on penal supervision, and through Rubio Arnal’s (2021) pioneering dialogical study of reintegration, I hope that this project will fully develop and exploit its potential as an analytical framework for this comparative penological work.

I’m going to end by returning – at last, you may say — to the question of rehabilitation and penal reform. To do so, I want to share an early conversation about the idea of developing the RaRiE project with one of my now co-investigators – Prof. Miranda Boone in Leiden. Miranda expressed some reservations about engaging in a project on rehabilitation. She didn’t and still doesn’t like the way that the term might seem to imply that there is a definable group of people who stand in need of some sort of special correctional treatment. Like me, and like most criminologists, Miranda doesn’t believe that ‘criminals’ exist as a ‘real’ sub-category of our species; they are just people who we have chosen to criminalise. There is therefore nothing distinctive or different about ‘them’ that needs correction.

In my efforts to talk her round, I made just two points. Firstly, I made clear that I wasn’t pitching to Miranda – and I’m certainly not commending to you – a project about or a vision or a version of rehabilitation as correction. As I hope I have already made clear, I think that rehabilitation is much more complex and multi-faceted than that. I agree with her that, since crime is a social construct, and since criminalisation is a social process, the idea that criminalised people are fundamentally different from other people or, worse still, that they are personally deficient in some way, is at best muddle-headed and at worst downright offensive.

My second point might at first sound contradictory, but I don’t think it is. Don’t we all need rehabilitation – and sometimes maybe even correction? What I mean here is that we all do harm to other people and therefore to social relationships that matter. After all, we all depend on our relationships to survive and thrive as humans. If we care about people we have harmed and about repairing our relationships with them, then surely at some time we’re all going to need something like rehabilitation – and perhaps sometimes something not unlike correction. Even at this age, I still want to change, to develop, to become a better person – both for the people I love and also for myself.

So, while I share the concern of critical criminologists and penal abolitionists that rehabilitation can be misused both to legitimate failing and unjust systems and institutions, and to cause and conceal real harms, I just don’t think I can do without it, and – in terms of the future of criminal justice — I don’t think I can imagine a constructive way of responding to harms, wrongs and conflicts that doesn’t involve something like rehabilitation as a series of inter-connected ways of enabling reintegration. We may seem a long way from fulfilling that kind of vision right now, but that’s no reason to give up hope – and it’s why your support for Howard League matter so much to me, to the Board and the staff. Don’t give up: Everyone can change; even the populist and the punitive deserve their shot at redemption.

[1] See: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/814650/economic-social-costs-reoffending.pdf, accessed 15^th January 2020.

[2] Space precludes a full discussion here, but answering that question of course demands close attention to many dimensions of diversity and difference within penal populations (most obviously, in relation to age, gender and ethnicity, but also in relation to other identity characteristics and to different patterns of offending; cf. Graham and McNeill, 2020).

Comments

• Janet Carter says:

  28 Nov 2025 at 1:37 pm

  Calling all influencers! Our last chance to save the concept of ‘rehabilitation’ in the Sentencing Bill. ‘Reduction of offending’ as the overriding principle over all statutory purposes (especially ‘punishment’) MUST be included in the Act.
  This was the member 1 recommendation in the Gauke report. It is totally missing from the Bill!
  Yet it is the absolute bones of the whole reform and decision making process. Let’s get it in!

  Reply