Rehabilitation and Reintegration in Europe

Until recently, the study of penal systems has focused mainly on their most severe or repressive features, but these systems often do great harm when aiming to do good, not least by expanding the scale, reach and intensity of penal control. For example, recent research suggests that ‘rehabilitation’ has become focused on managing risks rather than enabling reintegration and that, in consequence, it often hurts and harms those that it claims to help. By examining evidence from three countries that are often considered ‘progressive’ (the Netherlands, Norway and Scotland), the RaRiE project will help us better understand whether and where rehabilitation lives up to its ideals, and to creatively, critically and comparatively interrogate its development and prospects, its coherences and contradictions, its rhetoric and its realities, its pitfalls and its possibilities. Through a new approach that I call Dialogical Comparative Penology (DCP), building on the interdisciplinary approaches that I have used in a series of innovative, high-impact research projects, RaRiE will provide a uniquely comprehensive analysis of the nature and impact of rehabilitation in these three nations. It will also develop new tools and metrics for critically assessing rehabilitative systems and practices, to better direct their future development. In and through dialogue with policymakers, senior leaders in prison and probation systems, practitioners, activists and people with lived experience of rehabilitation, RaRiE will help to improve the fairness and effectiveness of European penal systems. RaRiE’s ambition -- the ‘step-change’ it offers – lies both in developing a new approach to comparative penology, and in using that new approach to reshape how rehabilitation is understood and developed in Europe.