Rehabilitation, corrections and society: the 2017 ICPA Distinguished Scholar Lecture

Last October, I was honoured to provide the Distinguished Scholar address to the ICPA conference in London. This short paper summarises my talk, in which I tried to unravel the knot of inter-related meanings of rehabilitation and reintegration. The paper explores how these different forms of rehabilitation and reintegration relate to the roles and purposes of ‘correctional’ agencies (i.e. prisons, probation, parole). Through this exploration, I aim to show that these agencies of the state (or commissioned by the state) have an important but ultimately limited role to play in rehabilitation and reintegration; both processes require a broader engagement with individual citizens and with civil society. It follows that correctional agencies need to focus as much on engaging with communities as on preparing people who have offended for integration or reintegration into those communities