Creating a Rehabilitation Culture

Leading criminologist Shadd Maruna asks: can we make a decisive shift from targeted programmes of intervention within a predominantly punitive criminal justice culture, to a much more pervasive rehabilitation ethos that extends to entire institutions, services and communities?

Numerous criminal justice observers have argued that offender rehabilitation does not come in a ‘programme’.

Although targeted treatment interventions can be helpful in promoting desistance from crime, these projects are too often undermined by an overarching punitive culture that stigmatises and labels the individuals that programmes are meant to be ‘correcting’.

The focus of many rehabilitation activists in recent years has been on creating rehabilitative ethos and cultures within entire institutions, probation services, and indeed wider communities. But is this possible and realistic?

In advance of the RSA Transitions report, leading criminologist Professor Shadd Maruna visits the RSA to assess the likelihood for success.

Speaker:Professor Shadd Maruna, Director of the Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice, School of Law, Queen's University Belfast

Chair: Rachel O'Brien, RSA

Find out more about RSA Transitions