Reimagining Rehabilitation

Beyond the Individual

Lol Burke, Steve Collett, Fergus McNeill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138233188
• eBook ISBN: 9781315310152
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Criminologia

This book aims to make the case for and provide some of the resources necessary to reimagine rehabilitation for twenty-first-century criminal justice. Outlining an approach to rehabilitation which takes into account wider democratic processes, political structures and mechanisms of resource allocation, the authors develop a new model of rehabilitation comprising four forms – personal, legal, social and moral.

Personal rehabilitation concerns how individuals make their journeys away from offending and towards reintegration and how they can be supported to do so, whilst legal rehabilitation concerns the role of the criminal courts in the process of restricting and then restoring the rights and status of citizens. Moral rehabilitation is concerned with the ethical basis of the interactions between the individual who has offended and the people and organisations charged with providing rehabilitative services. Social rehabilitation explores the crucial contribution civil society can make to rehabilitation, exploring this through the lens of citizenship, community and social capital.

Drawing on the conceptual insights offered in the late Stan Cohen's seminal work – Visions of Social Control – and specifically his insistence that modern social institutions can aspire to doing good and doing justice, the authors argue that these values can underpin a moral pragmatism in designing social interventions that must go beyond achieving simply instrumental ends. Reimaging rehabilitation within the context of social action and social justice, this book is essential reading for students and scholars alike, particularly those engaged with criminal justice policy, probation and offender rehabilitation.

1

INTRODUCTION

What’s wrong with contemporary rehabilitation and why do we want to change it?

This book aims to make a case for and provide some of the resources necessary for reimagining rehabilitation for the twenty-first century. Yet the term rehabilitation, at least in its criminal justice related uses, is both ubiquitous and ambiguous, so poorly understood and so vulnerable to misappropriation that, even as we begin, we hesitate. Throughout its history, rehabilitation has been discussed and debated as a process (to rehabilitate, to do rehabilitation) and, simultaneously, as a state or an outcome (to be or become rehabilitated). At different times and in different places, it has been freighted with the baggage of and/or lifted on the wings of theology, ideology and science. It has been concerned with individual character or personality, as well as with human rights and social justice. The discourse of rehabilitation has been used to justify everything from political re-programming to castration to aversion therapy to education to family contact to the provision of housing and work.

Later in this chapter and throughout the book, we will have more to say about definitions, forms, models and contexts of rehabilitation, both historically and in the present day. Here, at the outset, we want simply to acknowledge the vagaries of the term and to recognise the need to develop some precision about the different aspects of rehabilitation that this book aims to address and those that it must neglect. We also need to recognise that our illustrations and preoccupations will – to a certain extent – reflect our own histories and our current locations in time and place. The prequel to this book was concerned principally with Delivering Rehabilitation in the context of reforming probation services in England and Wales (Burke and Collett 2015). We make no apology for retaining the focus on probation in this volume. If punishment and rehabilitation have been most studied in prisons and jails, we are glad to contribute to redressing the balance. As Robinson et al. (2013) point out, most punishment and (we would add) most rehabilitation takes place in the community; in mainland Britain, the number of people undergoing community sentences outnumbers those in custody by more than 3:1. The same is true of the USA (Phelps 2013) and many European jurisdictions (Aebi et al. 2015).

Bearing that in mind, although scholars have recently discussed and debated the emergence of mass supervision in Europe (McNeill 2012a; McNeill and Beyens 2013) and mass probation in the USA (Phelps 2013), we make no apologies for focusing our attention on the jurisdiction that we (or at least two of us: Burke and Collett) know best – England and Wales. Unquestionably, that jurisdiction has wielded disproportionate influence globally in the development of probation practices and services; for example, even today, many jurisdictions are following with great interest (and some alarm) the privatisation of much probation work in England and Wales. Accordingly, we hope that by illustrating our argument primarily with reference to England and Wales (and to a lesser extent, with reference to their very differently constituted and inclined neighbour, Scotland) we will entice rather than alienate readers from further afield. Certainly, we hope that the arguments we offer will resonate in and contribute to debates elsewhere. But let us begin where we are, even if only to move beyond the tyranny of the here and now.

Here and now

Most prisoners serving short sentences had multiple and complex needs. Basic custody screenings, completely at the start of sentence, by HM Prison staff, drew only on what the prisoner had said and were a wholly inadequate basis for resettlement planning. The National Offender Management Service guidance for completion of these initial screenings did not promote depth or quality. Resettlement plans, completed by CRC staff within five working days of the screening, did not address the most urgent resettlement needs. In too many cases, resettlement planning consisted of no more than referrals to other agencies, recorded as completed once an email had been sent.

(Criminal Justice Joint Inspection 2016: 7)

She just seemed to have the answers . . . Time was never an issue . . . I mean I carried on seeing her for three months after my probation order ran out . . . I could just talk about things with her that I couldn’t talk about with anyone else . . . things that happened during my time in the army. I could be honest with her . . . You know she, yeah I could tell her the truth and she was never, she never judged, which most people do. But no she was brilliant.

(abridged from Farrall et al. 2014: 129)

Even outside the confines of the academic community, parliament, government departments and delivery organisations, the appetite for discussing crime, the process of criminal justice and the treatment of those who appear before the courts appears to be insatiable. Whilst much public attention, usually fanned by the news media, is focused on high-profile, shocking or lurid crimes and those who commit them, there is, perhaps, some evidence of a subtle change in the way in which the public is beginning to perceive issues of criminal justice and the challenges of rehabilitation. This reflects a number of trends in wider social and political life but we suspect it also has something to do with a neoliberal ascendancy that seems to have – for the moment at least – won the battle to commodify the rehabilitative resources and structure of the Probation Service in England and Wales, extracting profit for the private sector, at the same time re-shaping practical approaches to the supervision of individual offenders and promising efficiency and effectiveness. What then are the public to make of the quote above, in which a local Community Rehabilitation Company (CRC), in this case Derbyshire, attracts significant criticism (HM Inspectorate of Probation 2016) when, in its previous life as a Probation Trust, Derbyshire was a publicly acknowledged success as were the 34 similar Trusts that made up the National Probation Service before the advent of Transforming Rehabilitation (see Ministry of Justice 2013a, 2013b; National Offender Management Service 2013)?

The early signs, just over four years on from the June 2014 introduction of the new arrangements in England and Wales for community supervision and prisoner resettlement, are clearly worrying. Recently, HM Inspectorate of Probation (2017) published a highly critical report about the service provided to sentencers under the new arrangements and in the same year the National Audit Office (2017), when reviewing concerns about the financial arrangements and capacities of the CRCs, also commented that by the end of June 2017 two-thirds of the performance targets set for CRCs by the Ministry of Justice had not been met. In 2018 HM Inspectorate of Probation also highlighted the failure of CRCs to meet the much cherished ambition for greater involvement of the voluntary sector in direct service delivery and the engagement of volunteers as mentors for individuals who have offended. Alongside these and equally dispiriting, as the above quote from the Criminal Justice Joint Inspection highlights, was the poor start to the (Conservative) UK government’s flagship through the gate initiative based on the re-organisation of the prison estate in November 2014 to designate 89 of the 120 prisons in England and Wales as resettlement prisons intended to deliver a seamless service for short-term prisoners. As the quote suggests, there is evidence that (under the fee for service arrangements) individuals have become the objects of procedures rather than human subjects of supervision. Compare the email determination of an onward referral as a successful outcome with the person talking to eminent researcher Stephen Farrall about his experience of probation supervision. Here, the supervising officer responds to this person’s needs even when the order had terminated because he still required her help on the journey to desistance from crime. As Ben Crewe has warned, the legitimacy of the system is undermined ‘if it appears to operate for its own sake while ignoring real needs, or if it pursues targets as ends in themselves’ (2007: 225). One of the questions we will try to tackle in this book will be this: What does an informed public who pay for rehabilitative services through taxation – whether delivered through private or public organisations – want: punishment through payment by results (PbR) or rehabilitation through skilled engagement between worker and the individual who has offended or both or something in between?

This introductory salvo is not intended to preface yet another sociopolitical critique of the commodified approach to delivering rehabilitation that has been gaining momentum under New Labour, Coalition and Tory administrations over the past four decades (McCulloch and McNeill 2007). Indeed, from Garland’s (2001) masterly analysis of the demise of the post-war settlement, the collapse of penal welfarism and the advent of a Culture of Control through to less ambitious but more recent analyses of British criminal justice policy and political developments (Mair and Burke 2012; Burke and Collett 2015, 2016), the fragmentation of a unified Probation Service in England and Wales has been critically anticipated for some time. Furthermore, both public and professional attitudes to people who offend and the detailed delivery of rehabilitative services have changed to both accommodate and reflect continuous shifts in penal politics and policies.

In Delivering Rehabilitation, two of us, noting some progress within a deeply critical and pessimistic view of the future of rehabilitation under current neoliberal thinking, reflected the same concerns:

What we hope our work has demonstrated, nevertheless, [is] that academics and practitioners have joined forces over the past decade or more to reimagine rehabilitation as a process that benefits those who offend and those who do not. It now requires our political leaders to do likewise and reimagine a world where social and economic equality brings us all closer together.

(Burke and Collett 2015:189)

Our joint focus then and the motivation for undertaking this new work is an attempt to move beyond simply understanding why people offend and how to control crime and towards a better synthesis of the literatures across academic and research disciplines that illuminates the journeys individuals travel to stop offending and find their way towards participation and inclusion in society – and crucially, what is known about how to best support them (and us) to do so. This book will argue that rights and responsibilities apply to all citizens (not just those who happen to have been successfully prosecuted for offending) and that the State and civil society also need to play their parts in enabling all of us to enjoy our rights and fulfil our shared and mutual obligations. This is not just a matter of individual capacities and motivations; it is about our shared commitments and about the social, economic and political infrastructure that creates and, conversely, limits opportunities. Therefore, we will consider not just how, why, when and with what sorts of help individuals change, but also wider democratic processes, political structures and mechanisms of resource allocation within which current modes of service delivery are taking place within England and Wales and beyond. In this sense, we take as our starting point the thinking and arguments contained within Delivering Rehabilitation (Burke and Collett 2015) but aim to move beyond a critique of neoliberalism and some basic prescriptions about what is required to deliver rehabilitation to an attempt at Reimagining Rehabilitation within the context of broader social change, however hard this may be to achieve. What we are clear about is, first, that the failure of rehabilitation to secure political support can lead to excessive levels of coercion in the community and increased levels of imprisonment and, second, that practical and utopian ideas can and must exist together.

Unravelling rehabilitation(s)¹

Textbook discussions of rehabilitation tend to begin with dictionary definitions. Raynor and Robinson’s (2009: 2) excellent book, for example, tells us that the Oxford English Dictionary defines rehabilitation as ‘the action of restoring something to a previous (proper) condition or status’. So, rehabilitation is (1) an action that (2) restores (3) for the better. Raynor and Robinson (2009: 3) also note that the OED’s supplementary definition refers to the ‘restoration of a disabled person, a criminal etc., to some degree of normal life by appropriate training etc.’. This version adds the concepts of some (4) ‘normal’ standard, returning to which requires (5) some form of third-party intervention.

Despite the frequency with which rehabilitation has been discussed in the criminological literature (and, we might add, in policy and practice), the term is rarely ‘unpacked’ and critically examined. Raynor and Robinson (2009) provide the following example of a problematic criminological description of it:

[T]aking away the desire to offend, is the aim of reformist or rehabilitative punishment. The objective of reform or rehabilitation is to reintegrate the offender into society after a period of punishment, and to design the content of the punishment so as to achieve this.

(Hudson 2003: 26)

As Raynor and Robinson (2009) note, this statement raises a number of issues. First, there seem to be at least two objectives in play here: ‘taking away the desire to offend’ (that is, somehow changing the ‘offender’) and reintegration into society (that is, somehow changing his or her relationship with and status in society). But how are these two objectives related? Second, and more directly pertinent to this book, it suggests two different relationships between rehabilitation and punishment; in one rehabilitation comes after punishment, in another rehabilitation itself is seen as a distinct form of punishment. Considering probation’s history, we might also suggest a third relationship, where rehabilitation (particularly in the community) is cast as an alternative to punishment (usually in prison).

In an effort to clarify some of these complexities, Raynor and Robinson (2009) go on to offer their own typology of perspectives on offender rehabilitation, examining the meanings and significance of correctional rehabilitation; rehabilitation and reform; reintegration and resettlement; and rehabilitation and the law.

Correctional rehabilitation, they argue, is concerned with effecting positive change in individuals. As such it is the model most commonly associated with treatment programmes or other forms of offence- or offender-focused intervention. At its heart is the notion that many offenders can change for the better, given the right support. The idea of correction implies that the ‘offender’ can and should be ‘normalised’ or ‘resocialised’ in line with commonly accepted (though rarely explicitly articulated) standards of behaviour. Raynor and Robinson make the critical but often neglected point that correctional rehabilitation comes in many forms; the variety of theories and methodologies about ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Praise
• Reimagining Rehabilitation
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: What’s Wrong With Contemporary Rehabilitation and Why Do We Want to Change It?
• 2 Reimagining Social Control and Support: Current Realities, Dystopian Futures?
• 3 Reimagining the Rehabilitative Journey: Personal Rehabilitation
• 4 Reimagining the Legal and Sentencing Framework: Judicial Rehabilitation
• 5 Reimagining Practice Cultures and Values: Moral Rehabilitation
• 6 Reimagining Civil Society and Community Engagement: Social Rehabilitation
• 7 Conclusion: Beyond the Personal – Reimagining Something Better, Fairer and More Effective?
• Index